One moment, 13 years and a hit documentary: Chinese filmmaker Zhang Tongdao journeys into his son’s generation

Film director Zhang Tongdao’s 13-year labour of documentary love began in a moment alone with his son more than a decade ago. One winter morning in 2006, Zhang was showing his four-year-old son on how to wash his hands when the boy pulled away from the tap, saying the water was too hot. “I told him it wasn’t [too hot] since I had just washed [my hands],” Zhang, 54, said. “My son looked at me seriously and said: ‘That’s what you feel – but it scalds me.’” Zhang was taken aback – he would never have spoken to his own father that way, but the boy’s remark left him with a question that ended up taking more than a decade to answer. “Traditionally, there is an Emperor Qin Shi Huang living in each Chinese father’s heart,” the filmmaker said, referring to the dictatorial founder of the Qin dynasty (221-207BC). “So I was curious about what my son and other children of his generation were like and why they talked that way.” The conversation with his son inspired Zhang to start work on a film – Born in 2000, a documentary following the lives of 18 children over 13 years. The film builds on a 2009 documentary Zhang made called Kids Kingdom, which introduced audiences to the children who met at kindergarten in suburban Beijing before going to different schools. Born in 2000 shows how that generation grew up to be more interested in personal development and less focused on wealth or power. Released in September, the documentary has been a minor hit, with more than 100,000 people, including teachers, parents and children, watching the film in cinemas across the country and thousands more booking tickets for screenings this month. For Zhang, director of the documentary centre at Beijing Normal University, the work is about growth. “I’d like to present the experience a person has growing up, and what effect the frustrations and education from school and family have on them,” he said. “We need to understand these kids before dealing with them, otherwise we will treat them in the wrong way.” At the heart of Born in 2000 are 18-year-olds Chi Yiyang and Wang Sirou. They were labelled by many teachers as “problem students” – Chi was a bossy boy who broke rules and bullied other children at the kindergarten, while Wang was a sensitive and withdrawn girl who dreamed of being a princess. For all that, Zhang said, they belong to a post-2000 group that was a “normal generation” who do not hold strong aspirations for money or power. And “when they communicate with foreigners, they are confident”, the director said. After kindergarten, Chi studied at a “gloomy” public primary school, where he said he felt undervalued because of his poor academic record. A turning point came when he discovered American football, a sport that taught him discipline. By the age of 15, Chi had played with a Chinese national team in a world youth competition in Harbin, in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang. Today, he is in high school and applying to go to an American university. His goal is to promote American football in China. After leaving kindergarten, Wang went to a small home-schooling institute, where she struggled with her studies, particularly maths. “To protect her” from China’s gruelling education system, Wang’s parents sent her to a high school in Texas, where she quickly became a top student and even helped her American peers with maths. The United States was not easy. Wang was taken in and then rejected by three host families, leading to isolation at school. A fourth family has set her on her way to studies at Purdue University in Indiana this autumn. After filming the lives of Chi, Wang, and the others for more than a decade, Zhang’s observations lead him to believe that his son’s generation is confident and assertive. While earlier generations thought the goal of studying was good jobs and a way out of poverty, post-2000 Chinese did not have that burden, Zhang said. “Instead, many of them think studying can enable them to become the ruler of their fate and develop the best part of them,” he said. “Isn’t this progress for our country?” As China has become richer, this new generation has not struggled with the hardships that confronted their parents. “They have not been bullied and they have never been destitute, so they won’t necessarily want [the status of] government officials and they won’t necessarily want to make big money,” Zhang said. “Life is full of fun, [they say] so why don’t I do something else?” The director hit back at critics who said his two “stars” were from rich families and did not represent their generation. Chi and Wang were from typical middle-class families in Beijing, he said. “First-tier cities like Beijing and Shanghai have many such families, and, every year, hundreds of thousands of Chinese students go abroad to study. These two kids in my film are not unusual at all,” Zhang said. “I’d ask [critics], without money you don’t need to respect your child? Without money, parents and children don’t need to communicate? This film is about something that’s not about money.” Wang Desheng, a doctoral candidate at East China Normal University’s department of education who studied children the same age as those in Zhang’s film, said he did not agree with the director’s conclusion. “There are two elements we need take into consideration,” Wang Desheng said. “One is that we should ask if they, as a whole group, do not aspire to money or government position, or only a part of them do not. “The other point is that the post-2000 generation is still growing up and their views towards money and power are not set in stone.” Wang Desheng said studies showed that those born after 2000 were heavily influenced by the internet and could easily access new information. They were also shaped by cartoon culture, consumer culture, entertainment, and computer games. Hong Kong’s young protesters can’t be pigeonholed, and neither can their problems “We should understand that they have common features because they are growing up in the same social environment, but there are also differences among them, because of the disparities in regions, social class, families, schools and in individuals,” he said. Li Tao, a professor from the China Rural Development Institute at Northeast China Normal University, agreed. “Their parents were born in the 1970s or 1980s. [Compared with their predecessors] these parents have more free, exploring spirits, better economic conditions, broader international horizons and better abilities to face risks. All these help provide social support for their children to make their personal choices,” Li said. In some ways, the two young people in Born in 2000 were typical of their generation, Li said, but, as city dwellers, they were a stark contrast to their counterparts in rural China.

One moment, 13 years and a hit documentary: Chinese filmmaker Zhang Tongdao journeys into his son’s generation

.css-1mniedq{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;} A conversation with his four-year-old begins Zhang’s voyage of discovery into the lives of children born in 2000

A conversation with his four-year-old begins Zhang’s voyage of discovery into the lives of children born in 2000