![]() ![]() He was thrilled when Song replied with words of encouragement. “A few years ago it felt like I couldn’t be respected even if I tried my best,” he wrote, but the film helped to “break down prejudice and discrimination”. After watching The Best is Yet to Come he felt so moved that he wrote to Song Yang, the actor who plays a hepatitis B sufferer in the film. Xie Peng (a pseudonym) is one of the handful of people who has successfully brought an HIV anti-discrimination case against his employer, winning back his job at a television network in 2018. One study in Guangzhou found that nearly 40% of healthcare providers had refused to treat HIV-positive people. Today people with HIV face similar kinds of stigmatisation to those depicted in The Best is Yet to Come. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. For more information see our Privacy Policy. Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. Officials covered up the problem, allowing the disease to spread further. In the 1990s around one million people in the poor northern province of Henan contracted HIV after selling their blood plasma at government-run clinics that did not follow hygienic procedures. Journalism is not the film’s only sensitive topic. ![]() “This topic is not so easy to talk about in China. It was Jia who suggested that Wang make a film about journalism. Both Wang and Jia hail from Shanxi, an industrial province in northern China, and the two are close collaborators. Like his mentor, the acclaimed film director Jia Zhangke, who has a cameo in the film, Wang is interested in the experiences of people alienated from mainstream society, particularly the struggle of outsiders trying to stay afloat in China’s menacing, polluted and often corrupt cities. Jia Zhangke, left, who produced the film and is the director’s mentor, plays a coal mine owner Ruan’s blog gave tips on circumventing the great firewall and discussed official corruption. In February this year the popular blogger Ruan Xiaohuan, known by the pseudonym Program Think, was sentenced to 12 years behind bars for “inciting subversion of state power”. In December 2020 the independent journalist Zhang Zhan was sentenced to four years in prison for her reporting on the start of the Covid pandemic in Wuhan. According to Reporters Without Borders, there are more than 100 journalists in prison in China today. “Not many people believe in idealism any more.” Still, Wang is full of praise for the few independent journalists who persist in “keeping their eyes on things. Journalism was full of possibilities to make change,” he says. “That era was full of possibilities for individuals and personal growth. Wang’s film is full of nostalgia for that more optimistic time. Not only would such reporting be impossible in China today, the lawyer who represented the journalists in the Sun case, Xu Zhiyong, is now himself in prison. Although that reporting led to four journalists being arrested, and two being sentenced to lengthy jail terms, it also resulted in the abolition of the law that had allowed the police to detain Sun in the first place. In 2003 the Southern Metropolis Daily published an exposé about the beating to death by police of Sun Zhigang, a migrant worker in Guangzhou. But in the late 1990s and early 2000s, journalists were given a much longer leash to report on society than they are today. It was, Wang tells the Observer, the “spring” of China’s civil society. It was also the year in which Wang Jing, the film’s director, moved to the capital to study at the Beijing Film Academy, the country’s top film school. China had declared victory over Sars, and the country, especially Beijing, was thrumming with ambition as people rode the wave of reform and opening up that had turbocharged the economy. ![]() The film is set in the heady days of 2003. That makes it a modest success in commercial terms – but more striking is the fact that a film about the power of investigative journalism could be released in China at all. But last month it was released in China, taking in 52.3m yuan (£6.1m) in its first week at the box office. The Best is Yet to Come, which has been compared to All the President’s Men and Spotlight, toured the international film circuit in 2020. ![]()
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