The Sunday Show: A Conversation with Filmmaker Nanfu Wang

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On the Tech Policy Press podcast we talk a lot about the intersection of technology, media and politics. We talk about the flow of information and how political elites, journalists and citizens shape it. There is substantial contrast in how the pieces fit together in China, for instance, compared to the United States. And yet, there are parallels that one might not expect.

A recent documentary film explored these issues in the context of a particularly compelling moment in time: the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Directed by Nanfu Wang, In the Same Breath (HBO) is a riveting account of how the pandemic unfolded, how governments tried desperately to control the message as it did, and the ways in which citizens in two very different cultures and systems reacted, even as they themselves participated in shaping the discourse on social media.

This episode of the podcast features a discussion with Nanfu Wang, who directed and produced the film. Her prior films include One Child Nation, which documented the effects of China's one-child policy, and Hooligan Sparrow, which is about Chinese human rights activists attempting to bring accountability to government officials involved in the alleged sexual assault of young girls.

We discussed the film, touching on issues such as:

• The competition between democracy and authoritarian styles of government
• The extremes on display in China and the U.S. in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic
• The role of propaganda and identity in how individuals internalize the performance of the state
• The lockdowns in Shanghai and elsewhere in China and whether they may provoke any significant demands for reform
• The role of social media in shaping the understanding and behavior of citizens.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

Justin Hendrix:

So Nanfu, please tell me, what are you working on right now? What is your current project?

Nanfu Wang:

My current project I just finished. So it's a six episode docuseries for HBO. It's going to be premiering on June 20th called Mind Over Murder. It's a story that happened in small town Nebraska. I'm looking at that story to understand how malleable and fallible our memory is and to see what it takes to change people's minds when they have a certain subjective perception and memory that they believe is permanent, but sometimes aren't memory, but things that they were told and internalized.

Justin Hendrix:

Well, I will look forward to that one. I want to talk today a little bit about your last film in particular, In the Same Breath, and its meditation on the way that governments, authorities try to create realities and use the tools of the state and of course, use propaganda. And I thought I might start by just asking you, for anyone who hasn't seen the film, in your words, what do you think it's about?

Nanfu Wang:

I think In the Same Breath is a film about the pandemic that we all lived through, but looking at it through the lens of how government shaped information and how propaganda and censorship together formed a narrative that a lot people took in and believed is what happened, but it contradicts the reality that many other people lived through.

Justin Hendrix:

So one of the things that is a powerful about it, of course, is that you were able to extract all of this footage out of China, out of Wuhan at the time. Was that an almost happy accident, in that you were in touch with so many filmmakers in the space? And it's an incredible that you were able to evade censorship.

Nanfu Wang:

There is no happy accident in filmmaking, I would say. Every single frame, every single shot that ended up being the film that we were able to capture, it was a huge amount of effort by a lot of people, people who are behind the camera, people who worked, trying to connect, trying to find the subject, a group of researchers, the field producers, and cinematographers. Everybody, I think, took huge risks, both personal and political risks to get what you saw, eventually the result of film to be documented.

So from the very beginning, when I realized the outbreak was happening in Wuhan, and from there to the decision of making the film, the next step was really trying to find whoever was in Wuhan that we could trust who had the ability and even just the access to get out to the world, to the city because most of people are under very strict lockdown at the time. So it took a long time to eventually get from one cinematographer to another and another. Eventually we had more than 10 cinematographers filming inside Wuhan in different places, different institutions, different people's homes. It was a huge team of people.

Justin Hendrix:

You have commented elsewhere on the fact that a documentary like this may not even be possible to make in the future, or that it may be more difficult to make. Do you think that's the case? Do you think that even just a couple of years later, it's hard to imagine getting this type of access in such a circumstance?

Nanfu Wang:

So this was the fourth film I made. Three of them are very focused in China, and my experience with filming in China was with each film the censorship increased and it got harder and harder to film in China. That is both because of the exposure of my previous films that made me more of a target, but also because the political environment was getting tighter and tighter in terms of the censorship.

So for my first film, I could take out my camera on the street and point it at people in public, and it would take them a while to react, depending on how sensitive the things that I was filming. The second film, it would have been impossible to be in public for more than half an hour without drawing attention from the local police and some intervention from the authority. And with this film, In the Same Breath, everything of course was filmed remotely with me being here in the U.S. and people inside Wuhan filming under the lockdown. But even with that, I've noticed how strict the censorship was, and not only from the government level, from the authority, but also self censorship became increasingly more severe than before, and this was the recent years of the governmental promotion of a sense of hostility from foreign countries, foreign media, international community. The Chinese government had successfully built an enemy, 'Everybody outside is trying to sabotage the Chinese government.' So anything negative, if it gets spread outside of China, is defaming us, is hurting our image. So every citizen has a sense of responsibility, a sense of patriotism, where they felt they needed to protect that image, and they needed to be careful to whom they are speaking to and what they're complaining about, and it's okay that internally, privately among friends I might complain about the situation, but it would be very different for them to be talking to the media.

So the kind of censorship from both levels, especially with the government, on the outbreak because in early 2020, and throughout till today I would say, the Chinese government felt the whole world was looking at Wuhan, was looking at China and wanting an answer, wanting to explore what exactly happened. It's ongoing, it's present, and it might hurt the narrative they built, which is a successful response in China to the outbreak. So the censorship is more strict because they do have to control the narrative and limit the access to whoever potentially would counter the official narrative. So making this film was much more challenging than anything else that I had made before, and that's one of the reasons that I feel in the future if I were to make another film in China it's going to get increasingly more challenging for all of those reasons.

Justin Hendrix:

So I do want to pause just for a moment on the idea of self censorship, or how individuals internalize the interests of the state. One of the people I teach with has done some work looking at the notion of positive energy in China, and the extent to which that is embraced as a responsibility and how that translates into the social media behavior of people. So I'm curious about that. I'm curious about the extent to which you've seen that change over the time that you've been producing films.

Nanfu Wang:

Yeah. Positive energy is a trendy word in China. Surely maybe a year before the outbreak started it became heavily promoted by the authority as a term that everybody's aware of. It's been said 24x7 on the media and in the education environment too. It encourages people to focus on the positive side of everything, whether it's a societal, economic, or any kind of issues. So it worked because it's almost self-help, that kind of a message to say, "Life is hard, the situation is hard, the society has all sorts of problems, but let's focus on the positive side so we can improve." And so a lot of people took on that message and really took it heart, and they also, I think, influenced other people among them.

So whenever people are complaining, whether it's some personal issues or national issues, quickly there were people jumping out to say, "Well, let's just focus on the positive side. China has these issues, but which country doesn't? Look at America." Then often American, the society, especially in the past five years is used as the counter, almost propagandized by the Chinese government because always the issues here are getting exaggerated, are reported mostly focused on negativity.

So the positive energy during the outbreak, and during my encounters with the people became more of an issue because you barely could get people to tell you their real feelings in a way. During the making of In the Same Breath I met so many people who lost their family members to COVID, and a lot of them were not really because of a natural disaster, but because the hospital was overwhelmed or the government didn't respond, there was a lack of help, all sorts of reasons that nothing was within their own control. But even to talk about how many hours they stood in the line to the hospital, or how many phone calls they've made to the government or to different institutions, many people are hesitant to share those stories because they felt that it was negative.

So that was one aspect of it, and the other aspect of course, is people who do voice their discontent, their complaint in public, especially on the media, tend to get repercussions, tend to face punishment. And even if it's not prison time, jail, or a fine, even it's just a phone call from the local neighborhood committee-- which became this organization on the lowest level to control people during the pandemic-- or a local police station phone call to them warning them, or questioning why they did that, is enough to deter people from speaking up.

Justin Hendrix:

One scene that sticks with me from the film was a woman who lost her husband, and to your point about the experience that she'd had, she probably had every right to be exceedingly angry about what had happened in his case and the lack of support and the lack of help from authorities, and yet you depict her, at the end, thankful to the state and thankful to the leaders for the role that they played essentially in helping China to confront the COVID virus. And it's an unexpected moment, at least for an American viewer, to see a person who's clearly suffered so much internalize the events in perhaps quite the opposite way as perhaps people would have here.

Nanfu Wang:

I think the specific case, or how it represents itself, she would thank the government despite that the government might be the cause of her suffering, I think would be surprising to a lot of people here; but the phenomenon behind the surface story, which is somebody acting against their own interest, their own personal interest, is universal, and it can be seen here too.

We've seen so many people here-- immigrants vote for policies that are against immigrants, women vote against the abortion rights-- and we've seen a lot of issues where here people would act in a way that is against their own personal interest. And you question why, it shouldn't be that way. And in the case in China, I think, largely it's the power of propaganda, the power of brainwashing in a way that the woman, the clinic owner, that she lived her whole life receiving the kind of education that tells her the national interest is above the personal interest. And throughout the pandemic, she watched the news, the media tells her that the government did the best that it could. They did everything they could to help people, and so she was thankful to go to the government.

A lot of people, even in another scene in the film where somebody, a father whose son died of COVID and he received 600 Yuan, which is less than a $100 from the government, and he thanked the government. People didn't realize what kind of a rights they have. They see the government almost as their savior and any kind of a "benefit" that they received from the government they don't see that as their right, and they don't see that's the obligation of the government. They don't understand the relationship between the government and the governed, and so they feel appreciative.

They feel thankful, and that's overwhelmingly true with the majority of people in China. And here, when I was filming the American portion of the film, and noticed how many people are against the lockdown policy, the stay at home policy and arguing for reopening during 2020, and a lot of people seem to be voting for the things that will hurt them in the end, and you question why do people behave this way? And I think a lot of them were because of the ideology that they grew up with or their education background, or the kind of information that they were exposed to that essentially they formed an ideology that is so distorted that it might hurt themselves, but they weren't aware of it.

Justin Hendrix:

And I do want to focus in on the contrast, because it is almost a jarring contrast between, on some level, some similar context in terms of the state fumbling forward, unable to really deal with the scale of the disaster as it unfolds, and yet the situation in the U.S. with regard to the way the population reacts of course, is very different, and the depiction that you have of protests in the street against lockdown, the ardent desire to assert freedoms in the face of a government trying to force people to act in their common interest. It's extraordinary, and you really do get this sense of two extremes.

Nanfu Wang:

I think sometimes when I look at... I'm a Chinese citizen and I've lived in the U.S. for 10 years, and it was oftentimes natural for me to draw comparisons with the two countries and the issues in two countries, and sometimes they're completely very different political systems, and sometimes the issues seem to be exactly the opposite, but the ultimate cause behind it, or what was driving the political interest of the leaders, what eventually drives the results of the policy, is the same in a way. There's more similarity than differences.

In this case, I felt from the very early on China made a mistake, which was there was a lack of transparency and the government was trying to cover up the problem until it was no longer in their control, until that there is no way any cover up could stop it from being known, and so it took a while. They had known that the virus existed, they had known that the virus could transmit between humans, but for a long time, that wasn't what they told the public or told the world.

And we all have experienced this in the U.S. as well, and it's almost like it's then not only China, the U.S., and elsewhere in the world, we've noticed that government leaders, their instinct is to preserve the power, preserve their image, preserve trust in a way by telling everyone is okay, but little did they know once the trust is broken it's actually even harder to make it up, to repair it. So that's why also I think we, as a world in the U.S. as well, I see in conspiracy theories rising more than ever, and it's because there is a lack of trust in the authority, a lack of trust in the government, and we couldn't blame the people because the trust was broken in the first place.

Justin Hendrix:

You do focus in the film, of course, on the reaction of American officials. It's not even discussed that much these days, that people like Anthony Fauci deliberately created a false impression, particularly around masking and other elements at early beginning of the pandemic. I don't want to say that there's a equivalence between the reactions of the Chinese government and the American government, but there's something of an equivalence. There's a very similar reaction in terms of leaders, people of authority, as you say, to preserve face or preserve their power or their ability to hold onto the reins. I don't know. Is there anywhere in the world that you observed that you think did it right?

Nanfu Wang:

What? Did it right?

Justin Hendrix:

Dealt with COVID correctly or was more somehow honest and humane about it, perhaps, than we had in this country or than we observed in China?

Nanfu Wang:

Absolutely, I think there were a lot of places that I think did better than those two places, which aren't the extreme in a way notoriously that how bad it has gone. There are places where for different reasons that it worked better, whether it's in Taiwan, where the leaders acted really quickly and had contained it from early on, New Zealand and other places as well that had more transparency, that had more early response reaction and dealt with it not in a way like the U.S., which had delayed and very contradicting messages from the higher ups, or China's very Draconian and authoritarian style of control, which for a while in 2020 it had boasted as a success, but now we are seeing the situation got even worse in 2022 than it had ever been.

Justin Hendrix:

So I do want to come to the lockdowns in Shanghai and Beijing and elsewhere in this latest wave and what you've observed, perhaps, in the last few months about the Chinese reaction. What did the making of this film, I don't know, how do you look at that through the prism of what you know having put this film together, what do you make of their response to Omicron?

Nanfu Wang:

So in the past several months, Shanghai was under stricter lockdown, more strict than Wuhan in 2020, and the impact and damage on people is, if I were to say ,not equally or if not more so, but equally as in Wuhan. It was for over two months people in Shanghai were locked down; nowhere else in the world had that strict of a lockdown as in China. They were locked in their apartment and could not get out, could not get shopping, even though there was a shortage of food, a shortage of groceries, and there were cases where people literally starved to death because they couldn't get access to food, and there was lack of attention from the government and the differing institutions, neighborhoods, committee, things like that.

There was a lot of anger. There were a lot of complaints. There was a lot of discontent from people, but that doesn't translate into action. So people do complain, and one of the most, I think common attitudes of people in China after decades of living under a government that is so strong and powerful and the kind of education that is training people into a conformist that what they would say or do and deal with any of difficult situation is, "The government is doing what they can, and we don't really have any other choice," is almost acceptance, is most people's attitude.

So that's the same thing we're seeing in Shanghai, despite the complaints that people still just carry it through. And recently, about a week and a half ago, that the lockdown was "lifted," semi lifted because people still have to go through very strict limitations and restrictions in order to get out, and a lot of things are not recovered, and even though citywide they announced that Shanghai is lifting its lockdown, or more ironically, there were official statements announcing that they never had a lockdown, that this wasn't a lockdown. But I still have a friend who, after a day of being able to go out again, was put on locks on all entrances and exits. But what I wanted to say is after two months of that, most people what I know-- I lived in Shanghai for four years or so I have a lot of friends in there-- they again, are thanking the government. Thanking it for a bag of food that they received during the lockdown, thanking it for how tirelessly the government officials or the healthcare workers worked and thankful life is back to "normal" again.

So it didn't seem like things are changing, or there is a sense of like awakening or awareness after all of this. I don't think that would happen. There is a collective action, a collective awareness that's happening, and if anything, I used to think when in January 2020, that kind of awakening would happen in Wuhan, which I was hoping, but by February and March, you know, that it wasn't happening. So right now I'm actually pretty pessimistic, not knowing where the hope for change actually would've come from. And there is also, I think, a sense of pessimism in seeing how China eventually would resolve with the COVID policy because the zero COVID policy, which is what is guiding the government's action and direction, is not going to be realistic unless it is a forever lock down and constantly-- which has been happening for the past year or two from one city to another-- just constantly everywhere in the country that is going through a lockdown.

Justin Hendrix:

So you end the film with a meditation on what it means for China to be able to portray that it has dealt with COVID better than the rest of the world, or that it has done better perhaps than competitive systems of government like in the U.S. And it's almost a warning, or a sort of sense of foreboding about what that kind of victory means, right? The ability to say, "We were able to deal with this successfully, this complicated issue successfully." And in the war for systems of government and with democracies suffering from all the various backsliding, and in some cases, very self inflicted wounds you could imagine a future where a lot of people around the world say, "Oh, look at the Chinese model. It's working." Maybe in a future where environmental crises are ravaging the earth, and we need more authoritarian and swift responses to these complicated issues that we face. Do you think that perhaps the last couple of months, the Shanghai response perhaps, has maybe shaken that a bit? Has it shown the weakness in that authoritarian approach that ultimately an information imbalance eventually bursts?

Nanfu Wang:

I hope so. I hope the world is seeing that because in 2020, I did have a concern because of how positively the rest of the world responded to China, and responded to the Chinese government's narrative. Even just among experts and scientists and politicians all over the world, you've seen how they praised China, and that was probably my biggest fear than even the pandemic itself. Because the pandemic eventually, one day, would end-- whether it's two years, three years or four years-- but if that's where the direction of our future is going then, to me, that probably is the worst thing that could ever come out of this pandemic. And we have already, as a world, witnessed in the past few years the rise of authoritarianism and the decline of democracy everywhere. I think a week ago, Joe Biden revealed that when President Xi Jinping called him to congratulate that he got elected, and the thing that he said to him was, "The future is authoritarianism, and democracy is not going to work because you don't have the time to respond in an emergency."

And it is true that authoritarianism tends to be more effective during an emergency, during a crisis, because democracy takes time to reach consensus, takes time to make decisions. So what you were saying, and it definitely is something that I would be very afraid to see, and I am hoping that seeing the long run and people really evaluating the cost of that "efficiency" is basically you are giving up your rights. And once you are used to giving up your rights at the crisis moment, it's not easy to gain it back. It's not easy to reverse it, and government could seize on that and make it not only just that as a crisis response, but a constant norm. And then I hope the world could see what is the best for their own rights and interest.

Justin Hendrix:

I want to just end up with maybe asking you to reflect a little bit on the role of technology and social media. My podcast is focused on tech policy and I concern myself with that, and in a weird way, social media, the internet is a character in In the Same Breath, but it's a silent one, and you get a sense of some very similar behaviors in some way across obviously very different social media environments on some level. I don't know, as you look back on it, as you think about what you've learned, how do you reflect on the differences or the similarities in the social media environment in China versus the U.S., and is there anything that one could learn from the other in any reasonable way?

Nanfu Wang:

That's a good question. It's also a hard question because you're looking at China where the social media is heavily surveilled, heavily censored, just like any sensitive topic, not only that you can't even get across the censorship, bypass the censorship, it won't be posted. It would be censored on the back end of the platform, that it won't be able to be allowed to be posted. That's one situation. There are just a programming of hundreds and hundreds of keywords, issues, whether it's June 4, 1989, or Xinjiang, some kind of a sensitive topics where it will never get to be seen. And then there was another issue where it's like the emerging sensitive topics, things that weren't sensitive before, but suddenly became sensitive. So for example, the keywords of the outbreak, the pneumonia and virus, all of those, the common terms, words became sensitive within a week or two after around the outbreak get censored, or even for example, In the Same Breath, the film's title would get censored a week after it's been posted, it would get deleted.

So we are looking at a social media performing China, the whole network that is have, I don't know the number of how many of cyber police monitoring in it, and we're looking at the U.S. where it also has the other issue, which is the abundance of the information on all sorts of social media and to the point where an ordinary citizen reading it could hardly detect what they read is a fact or not, could harder to tell the source of the information to evaluate, to assess the accuracy and the credibility of it, and it's not saying that doesn't exist in China as well. I think it exists in on Chinese social media just as in the U.S., the disinformation, but I would say people probably have less awareness of what they're reading is not, could it be fake? Could it be manufactured in China than here?

Although the common challenge is for both to detect what is true, what is not, what is facts and what is credible, and I think that challenge exists for people both in China or here and elsewhere in the world, and I don't know, and this is a question for you, what is the solution to that? And without getting into the area of a censorship, how do we go through the sea of information and to be able to have some kind of media education from very early on, from childhood is essential, but what kind of tools people can be equipped to do that? That would be a question.

Justin Hendrix:

Well, that's what we talk a little bit about on this show every week, on some level, is how to imagine developing policies and technologies and methods that perhaps can help us preserve democracy while at the same time having the benefit of tools for free expression, and it's not easy, and I suspect that, I think one of the things that you meditate on the film that I think about a lot is there's a lot to do with social cohesion has nothing to do with social media, nothing to do with tech really, and nothing to do with even information on some level, that there's something broader, a more complex set of circumstances at play, and understanding how tech and social media interact with those more complicated social and political circumstances.

I suspect we'll be working on that for decades as we try to sort this out, but I guess, like you-- well, I don't want to assume that you think this-- but I do worry that the time is short to figure out how to deal with information abundance and make democracies work again to the benefit of their citizens before we do face, perhaps, more substantial crises. because I suspect that's what we've got ahead of us, unfortunately, it's just more of these pandemics and more climate crises and more resource conflicts and more war. And like you, I don't know if citizens are going to be willing to try to preserve their own freedoms in exchange for what they get back, and it's not hard to imagine a future where people look at the situation and say, "This democracy thing is morally repugnant. More people are dying and being hurt because of this form of governance than this form of governance, and so we want this form of governance."

I could imagine that future. I don't know if we'll get there. We're not there now, I don't think, but that could be my bias. That was a long answer.

Nanfu Wang:

Yeah. I think there are over 200 countries and national constitutions in the world, and each of them claim themselves as a democracy. So it's really like the term is so broad, so loosely used and claimed, so when we say democracy is not working, is where it's not working a true democracy, or is it just an illusion of democracy or a self claimed democracy? That is a question.

Justin Hendrix:

That is a huge question, certainly in this country where arguably the democracy's been broken for some time. Well, I thank you so much for taking the time to speak to me today, and I apologize if any of my questions are naive. It's hard, I think-- you are one of those rare people who's lived in both places and has a really strong sense of the media environment in both, and I know I learned so much from my students when we talk about these issues and I learned a lot from your films, and I thank you for talking to me today.

Nanfu Wang:

Yeah. Thank you. This are all great questions. Enjoyed talking to you.

Justin Hendrix:

Thank you.