Chinese walker

Isabel Hilton: You`re now a filmmaker, you live in China — tell me about your background.

John D. Liu: I went to China first in 1979. I was 27. I`m half Chinese and my father had been telling me since [then United States president Richard] Nixon`s visit in 1972 that I had to go to China to help China develop. I was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and was living in Bloomington, Indiana, in the US. I didn`t want to go to China. It was an interesting time: I was young and America was an interesting place.

I had been to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, but China didn`t seem very interesting. It had a communist government and when I looked across the border from Hong Kong when I was 13, I saw a man pointing a machine gun at me. China to me at that time meant [the philosopher] Lao Tzu and Taoism and Tang literature. Contemporary China didn`t resonate. Then, in the late 1970s, my father said, “You must go because your grandmother is going to die.” What could I say?

So I went to China and I realised he was right: it was much more interesting for me to film in China than in the US. So I did a semester of language training and I went to work for [the American television network] CBS as a producer-cameraman. I worked for them for 10 years.

IH: How did you get from there to the environment?

JL: I was so exhausted after the collapse of the Soviet Union that journalism had lost its appeal and I wanted to make films instead news reports, so I went to work for Italian state TV, where I made one-hour documentaries, then for German TV for three years. By then it was the mid-1990s and the environment had been deteriorating. China was changing from a fearful place, just out of the Cultural Revolution, to a market economy. There was a flowering of creativity and greater social freedom. Although 1989 punctuated it somewhat, even that was book-ended by decades of peace and prosperity.

During this amazing period of reform, opening and economic progress, there was so much pollution. Finally it struck me: I live in Beijing, my children were born here, and we were all suffering. It was clear to me that I had both the right and the responsibility to do something.

Most of the Chinese seemed detached, as though it wasn`t their responsibility. I think they thought the government was responsible and they had been conditioned to believe that they didn`t have either the right or the responsibility [to act]. Some people thought, “I`m just one person; there`s nothing I can do.” Others thought, “It`s nothing to do with me; it`s [the role of] somebody else.”

And in a way, that was my attitude. I used to think somebody ought to do something about the environment but what I meant was, “Somebody else ought to do something about the environment.” I was too important and busy. But after a while I realised that this was the same attitude that was part of the problem. So we began the Environmental Education Media Project, to take existing films on the environment to China and to translate them into Chinese.

We started working with the Television Trust for the Environment, and we brought over [Britain`s] Channel 4 and BBC`s excellent documentaries, on pest management and water wars. Finally we took hundreds of films. Then we wanted to make films and needed research, but there was no research facility.

So we said to SEPA [China`s State Environmental Protection Administration] that we wanted to build a reference and research facility. They have a huge US $70 million building built by Japanese foreign assistance, called the Japan-China Friendship Environmental Protection Centre, on the Fourth Ring Road in Beijing. They opened up the cupboard where cleaning ladies were storing their mops. We said this wouldn`t do. Finally they took us up to the seventh floor and opened a door marked “Library” – it turned out to be a huge room, 750 square meters — that had been empty for three years.

So we began to build a library. Now it`s the largest concentration of environmental information in China — the China Environment and Sustainable Development Reference and Research Centre. It`s on the web. [American environmentalist] Amory Lovins has spoken there – so many people have been through there now.

Then we started making films, researching water, wetlands, grasslands, migration and so on. Then we found HIV was a huge problem in China and there wasn`t much information about it. So we helped the Chinese Centre for Disease Control to create the China HIV/Aids Information Network (CHAIN).

Be Sociable, Share!

•