Chinese TV Shows Worth Watching
Instead of watching another show on Netflix, you might consider watching something Chinese. We have decided to start listing interesting Chinese shows, movies, and documentaries. The criterion for making this list is that the director is Chinese, that we find the work interesting and thought-provoking, and last but not least that it is fairly easy to get access to a version with English subtitles. We normally concentrate our efforts on things narrowly related to Beijing, but this time we have expanded the scope to all of China. Some of the shows are maybe not full-blown masterpieces, but be patient; they are interesting and have something to say.
All titles below can be found on YouTube with English subtitles. We will continuously update the list. Below are the first four picks:
人民的名义 In the name of the people
This show from 2017 describes in a surprisingly frank way government corruption in the fictional Chinese city Jingzhou. The show focuses on the work of an actual unit in the Chinese police force that fights financial crime. “In the name of the people” received funding from the Supreme People's Procuratorate. The show got very lenient treatment by the censors, as it coincided with a great anti-corruption push from the central government. The show is worth watching for anybody interested in the workings of both Chinese politics and Chinese society overall.
人世间 A Lifelong Journey
This TV drama based on a book by Liang Xiaosheng of the same name is the story of a family named Zhou in Northeast China that, along with most other urban households in China, was broken up by political campaigns when people were sent to work all over the country and families were only allowed to keep one child with them in the city. “A Lifelong Journey” starts off in 1969 and follows three generations of the Zhou family from the Cultural Revolution to the time of Deng Xiaoping's reforms and the adoption of a more liberalized economic policy in China. ”A Lifelong Journey” was with an audience of more than 300 million people one of the most watched shows in 2022.
大同 The Chinese mayor
Zhou Hao, the director of "Chinese Mayor," followed the mayor of Datong, Geng Yangbo, for a whole year. The city of Datong has been described as the most polluted place in China because of the coal industry in the city. The movie follows the mayor, Geng Yangbo, as a fly on the wall when he desperately tries to revive the stagnated economy of Datong. Geng Yangbo’s grand vision is to create a new cultural image of the city by moving around 500,000 people to rebuild Datong’s old city wall.
他们选择中国 They Chose China
"They Chose China" is a documentary about 21 American prisoners of war who, in 1953, after the end of the Korean War, chose to stay in China. Some of them would hereafter stay in China for the rest of their lives; others would return to the U.S. just to get prosecuted by a witch hunt for socialist elements in the U.S. orchestrated by the notorious Senator McCarthy in the 1950s. The documentary is directed by Shui-bo Wang; in 2006, during the Cultural Revolution, he remembers how, as a young boy, he spotted a foreigner on the streets of his hometown at a time when foreigners were rarely seen in China. He was told that this foreigner worked in a local factory just like regular Chinese people. It was this encounter that later made Shui-bo Wang wonder about how this mysterious foreigner had entered Chinese society and inspired him to make "They Chose China."