Documentary Description
How free are the Chinese people? How free to worship as they please?
To learn the truth from the media? To hear the truth from the Communist
Party and the government? How can people with a grievance negotiate
with the state?
Tibetan Buddhism has long been feared as a rallying point and cover
for Tibetan independence. Worship is permitted on the Party’s strict
terms — neither government employees nor students are allowed to
practice. A study in contrasts, official Catholicism — administered not
by the Vatican but by the Communist Party — is far from China’s
unofficial churches with 40 million adherents who want nothing between
them and their God. The film also explores Falun Gong and the threat it
posed to the Chinese government as well as examining the limits on the
right to assembly and press freedom.
The second half looks at popular grievances: forced evictions,
government cover-up of the AIDS problem, corruption and land grabbing.
There were 87,000 officially-recognized cases of public disorder in
2005. The courts frequently refuse to take on sensitive cases, forcing
ordinary people to petition government — a frustratingly ineffectual
process. The cameras go inside a “Re-education through Labor” camp to
which women are committed without trial for up to four years for drugs,
sex or property offences — or for petitioning.
Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has acknowledged the problems facing
China’s rural population. The Party’s answer is to build what it calls
a “New Socialist Countryside” with free education, improved healthcare,
no agricultural tax and an extra $6 billion. But with corruption rife
in local government, will the money and the measures reach the people?
The final sequence in the series is the story of what happened to
Taishi Village, which sought to use the law to impeach and remove its
corrupt leaders. Praised by the leading Party newspaper in China one
minute, the village was overrun with police and militia the next. The
corrupt old leaders were reinstated by local government amid violence,
intimidation and arrests.
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