High Tech, Low Life. 2012. Directed and photographed by Stephen Maing. Produced by Stephen Maing and Trina Rodriguez. Edited by Stephen Maing and Jonathan Oppenheim. Music by Brendon Anderegg, Brad Hyland, and Kevin Micka.
(Note: this review has been cross-posted on VCinema.)
Stephen Maing’s timely and fascinating documentary High
Tech, Low Life, examines the subject of journalism and internet censorship
in China
through the eyes and experiences of two very different citizen journalists. Both are people from humble backgrounds who
found a new calling using the power of blogging and the internet to uncover
stories hidden from the public by the government and to give other people like
themselves (often in worse circumstances) a voice and an outlet for their
grievances that they have been denied in official channels. High Tech, Low Life has its world
premiere at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.
27-year-old Zhou Shuguang, known by the blogger handle
“Zola,” before embarking on his new internet life, was a vegetable seller from Fengmuqiao ,
Hunan Province. “I used to be a nobody before I discovered
the internet,” he says by way of introduction.
After deciding on impulse to investigate the forced eviction of citizens
of a neighboring province by city developers, and posting what he found on his
blog, the overwhelming response and the measure of fame he received encouraged
him to pursue citizen journalism full time.
The next major case we see him reporting on is the rape and murder of a
young girl by a high official’s relative, and the apparent subsequent cover-up
of this crime. This episode is
illuminating not only for its demonstration of Zola’s tenacious efforts to
expose the government’s complicity in protecting well-connected criminals, but
also the potentially negative aspects of Zola’s attention-seeking
personality. Zola gets his information
by disavowing any sort of journalistic identity, posing as simply a curious
onlooker and blogger. He attends the
dead girl’s public wake, and rather ill-advisedly snaps a photo of himself
smiling by the girl’s coffin, drawing an outraged comment on his blog
condemning his lack of respect for the dead.
Certainly, there is an egocentric aspect to Zola’s activities: he often
wears a T-shirt emblazoned with his own image, and at one point he takes a
picture of himself that makes it look as if he is leaping over the Great
Wall of China , which he makes into a large poster that he displays
at a Chinese blogger conference. However,
he consciously sees himself as a representative of the youth of China ,
with their distracted, short attention spans, and his brash, outsized antics seem
designed to appeal to them. And of
course, it’s not only about fame, since there are far safer and less controversial
ways of achieving fame than flouting censorship; he is no activist, but he
tirelessly strives to bring to light practices of corruption and exploitation
in his society that are kept from the public.
57-year-old Zhang Shihe, known as “Tiger
Temple ,” lives in Beijing ,
and has a much more low-key personality than the younger Zola. Similarly to Zola, he got into citizen
journalism pretty much by accident: he witnessed a brutal murder being
committed in public and posted stills on his blog. It was eventually taken down, but not before
being circulated widely by others on the internet. Tiger
Temple finds the outlet for
literary expression and his wish to help others less fortunate that had
heretofore eluded him, regularly traveling on his bike to the countryside and
reporting on farmers who have been neglected and ill-treated by government
authorities. He interviews and reports
on people who have had their land used as dumping grounds for toxic industrial
and human wastes, and on those who have suffered the broken promises of government
to assist them during changing agrarian policies. Tiger
Temple ’s age and personal
background provide a sense of history and cultural context that forms a
counterpoint to Zola’s relative inexperience.
Tiger Temple ’s
family suffered from persecution during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, in which his
family lost everything and he became homeless; thereafter Tiger
Temple embarked on the itinerant
lifestyle that he practices today. Tiger
Temple , also in contrast to Zola,
sees his brand of journalism as activism and advocacy for the people he reports
on. He arranges for legal representation
for the farmers, and he also tries to help the homeless in Beijing
around Tiananmen Square find housing after the city
destroys their makeshift shelters.
The film alternates between Zola and Tiger
Temple ’s separate trajectories,
until the two finally meet at a Chinese blogger’s conference. During their meeting, Tiger
Temple sizes up Zola immediately:
he calls him a “playful warrior,” a great phrase that perfectly describes
Zola’s approach to his journalistic activities.
Zola is also quite self-aware of his own generation: “We’re selfish,” he
says of himself and others of his age; he sees this attitude as the first step
in “breaking out of the Communist mindset.”
Zola and Tiger Temple
are far from fire-breathing radicals, but their activities in reporting
uncensored news nevertheless puts them squarely on the government authorities’
radar. Even though both are careful not
to call themselves “journalists” to avoid government regulation and censorship,
this doesn’t prevent them from regularly being followed during their travels
and having their plans thwarted. Zola is
refused permission to leave the country to attend a blogger’s conference in Germany ,
and Tiger Temple
is detained in the middle of the night and forced to leave Beijing
during a national conference. Their
efforts to evade the “Great Firewall,” China ’s
massive internet censorship mechanism, by providing information unfiltered by
the state, cause them to be regarded as threats to national security. The heat on them only increases during such
sensitive times as the Beijing Olympics and the state uprisings in the Middle
East and North Africa , the so-called “Arab
Spring.”
As indicated in title High Tech, Low Life, Stephen
Maing gives us a thorough sense of how the latest technological tools can be
used to illuminate the lives of those who live far from the places where such
tools are commonly available. In China ’s
case, many of these people are those who have been left behind, and often
trampled under, in the wake of the country’s rapid economic progress. High Tech, Low Life travels from Beijing
to the remote countryside, binding the experiences of the two contrasting
blogger personalities who are its subjects with evocative visuals that vividly
illustrate the social context that surrounds these two men and their search for
the truth.