This week we did not have a lecture because of the public holiday so I am going to type something about a video I saw in the workshop of my contextual major that is modern Asia. This video was talking around a topic, modernity and modernization, and the content of this is an obvious single of modernization, the urbanization.
This documentary was taken in 2006 to 2007, almost 10 years ago, and the main village in this is located in the middle of China, a poor and undeveloped village. This documentary shows a process of urbanization of the village named White Horse Village, and the argument between villager and the local government.
From this documentary, I suddenly found out a point that all the things we see from video are what the producer wants us to know. It means almost all the documentary that seems like real is actually mixed with fake.
Just take the video I mentioned before as an example, the main subject is villager, and they had lots of interviews with villagers. A great part of villagers think the local government destroy their old and historical home, they want to be rich, having a better life, but they do not want to change lots of thing. I can easily felt that this documentary spends too much time on villager but government official. Negatively thinking, the BBC chose White Horse Village from thousands of villages in China, and this White Horse Village had argument with the local government, a strong argument. In fact, in many villages, the villagers listened to the local government, no strong arguments happened. So I cannot control myself to think something wrong and bad to our national benefits. Is it possible that the BBC wants to bring shame on Chinese government? Let lots of audience who never been to China may misunderstand Chinese developed degree and Chinese government.
In the end, we need to question the videos we will see and saw, do not always believe something in media.