More like a list of lists. PBS's POV caught up with multiple China film directors, curators, and writers and asked them each what the must-see documentaries are by Chinese filmmakers. Unsurprisingly, The Last Train Home, Up the Yangtze, Tears of Sichuan, and multiple films by Zhao Liang all make the list. But there are also plenty of lesser-known titles, such as Circus World (available online here), that are definitely worth checking out. more ›

Just after we discovered BBC's Ai Weiwei documentary last week, this week PBS broadcast their own Frontline special on the Chinese artist entitled "Who's Afraid of Ai Weiwei?" Particularly after his show at Tate Modern last year, Ai Weiwei has become the most internationally famous Chinese artist and a front man for activism in China. The piece is done by Alison Klayman, taken from her upcoming full-length documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry. Watch it over at the Frontline website. more ›

Our second show for the day is the critically acclaimed documentary Seoul Train (featured on PBS) which offers a look at the estimated 250,000 North Korean refugees living underground in China today, who have braved untold dangers to escape a food and humanitarian crisis that has claimed the lives of 3 million back home. The camera follows several groups of North Korean refugees, some have chosen to forcibly make their way past the gates of the Japanese embassy in Beijing, others have chosen to attempt to send in a formal application to be recognised as refugees at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and yet others have chosen to make their way to Mongolia, in the hopes of eventually getting to South Korea, their promised land. If they are arrested, the Chinese government (which sees them as illegal economic migrants and not refugees) will certainly repatriate them to North Korea where they will face punishment and execution. It also offers a fascinating look at what's been called the Underground Railroad, a covert network of multinational cells of relief workers, activists and volunteers including a South Korean pastor, Chun Ki-won, who's been dubbed the Asian Schindler. This show is amazing in the way it acquaints the viewer with the complexity of the issue, taking into account a wide range of divergent views, and even taking on the UNHCR for its supposed compliance with the Chinese government. Till today, the UNHCR has not saved a single North Korean refugee. more ›

If you thought all Uighurs/Xinjiangers were fighting for the independence of East Turkestan, this video might be of interest to you. The Opposite End of China brings to our attention an excellent PBS documentary China from the Inside which features some very interesting footage such as a rare interview with Ismayil Tiliwadi, Governor of Xinjiang and new Uighur members of the CCP taking the communist oath. For some of them, the experience is akin to... more ›

If you have some time, it's definitely worth clicking around the site for a while. The site has another interactive sound map, with more than 20 sound clips from all over the country. We could have chosen that map to highlight in this post, but it totally skips over Shanghai, so we didn't. more ›

SFist commeters pose for before and aftershocks when the mayor commemorates a 1906 earthquake...at 4:30 in the morning. A hot tip on the Chronicle vending machines comes in and the SFist war correspondent risks life and limb to post this dispatch from the frontlines. more ›

If you've been following media reports about North Korea, then chances are you've also heard stories of North Koreans slipping over the borders to China, or trying to scale the walls of embassies in Beijing in order to get asylum. For most refugees, this means ending up South Korea, but don't think that just by making out of the "hermit kingdom" into China means getting to the promised land -- China is quite willing to send them back, as happened recently in Yantai, when seven North Koreans entered an international school. The refugees included five women and two men. Four of them were from one family. There's a Chinese article about it (containing mostly the same info as the English link above) here. more ›