china's economy

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Invisible Wall, a short documentary by Adan Avalos (a USC film student who migrated as a boy to the US) and Xie Han (a Communication University of China documentary film student), was discussed at the China economy workshop for teachers. It focuses on a migrant family that successfully runs a bath house serving a community of migrant workers on the outskirts of Beijing. The family's daughter is ready for middle school, but because the family's household registration (hukou 户口) is not in Beijing, the girl can't go to school in Beijing. The parents debate what to do. Dad says he wants the girl to have the brightest possible future, to have the chance to continue on, perhaps even to university. Mom says that the family's economic prospects are much better in Beijing, running the bath house, than they would be back home. What should they do? This film takes us inside the hard choices migrant families must confront. The film has both Chinese and English subtitles. It was produced in 2009 as part of a joint program between USC and CUC.

Click here to see the film at the USC US-China Institute's YouTube channel. (Click on the "360" button to increase the quality of the resolution to 480. You can run the film "full screen."

Click here to see the film at the USC US-China website.

Here's the main page for the 2009 USC/CUC project. (You can view all the USC/CUC films produced that summer via this page.)

What do you think of this film? How might it be used with students?

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A second student-produced documentary introduced during the China's economy workshop was Children of the Sun. It was made by USC student Justin Feldman and Communication University of China student Xiao Beidi. It looks at an NGO-run residential community for the children of incarcerated parents. The film focuses on the heart-wrenching situation of one boy.

Click here to watch the film at the USC US-China Institute website.

Click here to watch the film at the main page for the films produced during the 2009 collaboration between USC and CUC students. Several other interesting films are available here.

Click here to watch the film at the USC US-China Institute YouTube channel. This version provides the most flexibility (run it at higher resolution, run it full screen, embed it within your own page), but is blocked within China.

Please share your thoughts about this film. How might it be used with students?

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In 2005, China Daily ran an article about the Sun Village project. Entitled "You are my sunshine," the article by Xing Yangjian begins
"With turkey and gifts, the children of the Sun Village had an early Christmas last Wednesday.
"Each of the children has got a gift they wanted for Christmas, and we have also received gifts for our students at the Xi'an Sun Village," said Zhang Shuqin, founder of the Beijing Sun Village Research Institute for Helping Special Children.
Affiliated with the China Charity Foundation Relief Aid Department for Special Children, the Beijing Sun Village was formally established in Banqiao, Shunyi District of Beijing in December 2000. Another three Sun Villages were set up in Shaanxi and Henan provinces.
Today, the Beijing Sun Village supports 115 children between the ages of one and 18 years old, coming from Beijing as well as several other provinces within China. They all have one thing in common: they are the children of incarcerated parents."

Click here to read the full article.

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The Sun Village effort (the subject of the Children of the Sun documentary and China Daily article mentioned above) has English and Chinese websites.

Click here for the English site.

Click here for the Chinese site.

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My big aim with the intro was to highlight that while Americans "get" that China's rising economically, but they don't have a clear sense of the size of the progress that's been made, how China compares to the US, and some of the economic challenges the country faces. I've attached a pdf of my opening presentation.

Attachments:

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At the educators' workshop for our The State of the Chinese Economy conference (click here for the conference page), we screened Fan Lixin's award-winning film, Last Train Home. Please click here to see what we said about this film in our Talking Points newsletter when we screened it at USC in December 2010.

Los Angeles Film Critics chose it as the best documentary of 2010. It came out on dvd just this week. Click here for the film's website, which includes a trailer for the documentary.

Would you like to discuss Last Train Home? Please click here to go to the Last Train Home thread in our "film festival" forum. There you can find links to reviews of the film and contribute your own thoughts about the film and how it might (or clips from it might) be used with students.

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I've pulled select slides from most of the presentations. It seems to me that these could be used in some classes, either as part of a lesson, to launch a discussion, or perhaps to generate a research project. For example, one slide from Albert Park showed that wages for rural migrants rose during the financial crisis. Given how unemployment has risen here in the US, how can we account for this development? Slides from Barry Naughton and others help explain that China's demographic change means that the supply of labor is gradually narrowing. Other slides link to this question, noting how China will need to move to more capital intensive/technologically sophisticated production and will require a better-educated work force.

Please take a moment to look at the slides (I've attached a ppt version and a pdf version) and think about how you might use them with your students. Please share your ideas on what you might do with students (e.g., having students investigate US stats, for example on how minimum wages or health insurance premiums vary across the US, about the balance between industrial, agricultural, and service sectors of the economy).

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