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 美Discovery Channel电视今天开始播放Ted Koppel制作的关中国的纪录片 People's |
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美Discovery Channel电视今天开始播放Ted Koppel制作的关中国的纪录片 People's -- 表酱紫 - (4756 Byte) 2008-7-10 周四, 10:14 (1818 reads) |
表酱紫
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作者：表酱紫 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
July 8, 2008
Ted Koppel Tours a China Brimming With Dreams and Consumerism
By FELICIA R. LEE
Interviewing millionaires and peasants, drag queens and students as he tours nightclubs, classrooms, factories and upscale malls, Ted Koppel takes viewers beyond the oft-seen China in “Koppel on Discovery: The People’s Republic of Capitalism,” an ambitious four-part series that begins Wednesday night on the Discovery Channel.
The series, which depicts the complexities of an emerging capitalist economy tethered to an authoritarian government, vividly demonstrates the interdependence of the economies of China and the United States.
“We’ve covered a lot of bases,” Mr. Koppel said in an interview, adding that the series is especially important now that many of the news media have cut back on foreign coverage. He has been a managing editor at Discovery for the past two years, after a quarter-century as the anchor of ABC News’s “Nightline.”
“The People’s Republic of Capitalism,” one of a number of in-depth documentaries Mr. Koppel has done for Discovery, allows viewers a lingering look at Chongqing, a city of 13.5 million people in southwest China. A boomtown of luxury goods and nonstop construction, it is emblematic of the face of Chinese capitalism but unknown to most Americans.
“The U.S. relationship to China is so intricate and so deep that Americans need to know that it’s more than cheap labor at Wal-Mart or tainted toys,” Mr. Koppel said. “We’d have a hard time extricating ourselves from it.”
As “The People’s Republic of Capitalism” illustrates, big American companies like Wal-Mart and Ethan Allen have cut costs by relying on Chinese factories, which in turn allows them to sell lower-priced goods to American consumers. And while it means that some Americans lose jobs to workers overseas — and the series shows the pain of that displacement — even those unemployed workers find themselves shopping for the products made in China and arrayed in budget aisles across this country.
It took Mr. Koppel, the narrator and the on-screen interviewer, and his team of producers over a year to put together the series, with the exchanges with Chinese facilitated by translators. One fascinating segment traces the birth of an Apple iPod, which is designed in California and assembled in China.
“The People’s Republic of Capitalism,” shown over four consecutive nights, is being broadcast on the eve of the 2008 summer Olympic Games in Beijing, at a time when human rights advocates have been urging a boycott of the Games to protest China’s crackdown on antigovernment protests in Tibet and its support of the government in Sudan. It also comes not long after the devastating earthquake in Sichuan province, a disaster that provoked resentment in China against the government’s lack of preparation for the crisis.
Mr. Koppel contends that the story of China is as entertaining and dramatic as any novel: 300 million people have escaped poverty in less than a generation, and millions are migrating from the countryside to places like Chongqing, where the juggernaut of capitalism is powering a rapid transformation.
Often the new values have fueled a kind of lust for acquisition that Part 2 of the series calls “MAOism to MEism.” Viewers see young Chinese students intently learning English in order to take their place in the global economy, and a woman who has made millions from owning a restaurant and hotel complex says: “I am proud of being rich. I made my money through hard work.” No one in China talked that way in past decades, Mr. Koppel said.
The tension between the old and the new finds its way into the series. As an automobile magnate interviewed in Part 2 says, “With the pressure you get today, you realize in the old days was very simple.” A young singer who performs in English in a Chongqing nightclub observes, “Like any city that develops quickly, people are more or less lost in transition.” That means that almost anything goes, as long as it happens quietly and is not political.
For instance, while g a y men are more widely accepted, they are expected to retreat into the closet at some point and begin families.
Mr. Koppel recalled that the last time he spent an extended period in China was in 1973, at the tail end of the Cultural Revolution. He said he was struck by two major changes on his most recent visit: In the past one saw the occasional car; now the nation is putting 25,000 new vehicles on the road every day. And now, in interview after interview, people talked openly about wanting to get rich, a desire once verboten.
“In 1973 when I asked, ‘What do you want to be?’ the answers were political,” Mr. Koppel said. “People said, ‘I’d do whatever the motherland needs of me.’ This was a time when intellectuals were being shipped out to the countryside by the millions, and you could not express any personal ambition, because it could cost you your life.
“Today people say, ‘Hey, I want to get rich, I want to make money.’ You can be a capitalist and want nothing to do with democracy. There is the tendency to believe that once you put a Big Mac on the table and wash it down with a Coke, you imbibe the need for democracy. It doesn’t happen as quickly as we would like.”
“The People’s Republic of Capitalism” has had a number of screenings, at universities and other places devoted to exploring foreign policy and culture.
“I thought it was very well done,” Adam Segal, a senior fellow in China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, a national policy organization, said in an e-mail message about the documentary. The council’s office in New York City held a screening and discussion with Mr. Koppel in June.
“I would not say it adds very much to the scholarly debate, but for the general public it is notable for several reasons,” Mr. Segal said. “By showing how the vast majority of Chinese have been made better off by economic development, it provides a credible argument for why, even with fairly widespread social unrest, the reign of the current regime is not seriously challenged.”
Mr. Koppel said that what has stayed with him are the stories of people who for the first time in their lives have enough to eat and clothes on their backs, allowing them to strive for something more. They call these the “best of times,” he said. He recalled a married couple in the country, earning $1,500 a year from manual labor and living on $600 a year so that they might put their two children through school. They dream that the next generation might become professionals with better lives than their own.
“These are what we call great American success stories,” Mr. Koppel said. “Well, those kinds of things are happening in China all the time, and it’s a thing to behold.”
作者：表酱紫 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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