As we took on this project, our goal was to do something that hadn’t been done. There have been many documentaries set around the booming cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. We wanted to go somewhere that people hadn’t heard of.
Television is first and foremost visual. Reading about a place just doesn’t cut it. So, in August 2007, I hopped a plane to Chongqing.
I had been to Beijing a number of times on presidential trips and covering the uprising at Tiananmen Square. But I had never been near southwest China. It isn’t a place hard news leads a reporter. The questions in my mind were:
How visual will Chongqing be?
How interesting will its people be?
How open will they be to foreigners?
How much cooperation will we get from the authorities?
When I got to Chongqing, my reaction was roughly, "Oh my God." This city, which had a reputation as a bit of a backwater, had a skyline that was like that of New York. It was tucked into the hills and situated on two rivers like Pittsburgh. And when the lights went on at night, it was Hong Kong.
If the location sold itself, the people sold it even harder. Chongqing is a blue-collar town where people could hardly be described as shy. They have a reputation in China for being mountain people, what we might call hillbillies. Everywhere we went, we were bombarded with questions. "Who are you?" "Where do you come from?" "Why did you come to Chongqing?"
"What do you think about Chongqing?" And everywhere we went, once we answered these questions, we were welcomed with enthusiasm. These people are proud of their city, proud of their work ethic, proud of their families. It took me almost no time to e-mail back to the rest of the group, "We have our place."
Our secret weapon was Nick Mackie, an extraordinary Scotsman who is the only English-speaking foreign journalist in Chongqing. Nick had been working in Chongqing for four years. He had married a delightful Chongqing woman (Chongqing women are noted in China for their beauty), and had established a reputation with the political and business leaders for honest but fair reporting.
Nick was a central player in this project. We trusted Nick’s integrity and he vouched for us with people who knew and trusted him. The Information Office in Chongqing wrote a general permission letter for us to move with complete freedom. There were no preconditions. We tried to give the office some sense of where we intended to shoot, but we had no minder, no one from the government watching over our shoulder.
At times neighborhood police would stop us to check our credentials. Only once were we seriously questioned about what we were shooting, and after the questioning we were allowed to continue. At times the Information Office had to tell local police to allow us to move freely, but the degree of oversight was minimal. The one time we asked to film where permission was denied was the Chongqing prison.
This is a city in which filming was a real delight. Once it was clear we had the required permissions, people could not have been more cooperative. What will always stick with me is the energy, casual friendliness and intense curiosity of these people.
Chongqing probably has the worst climate of anyplace I've ever visited. Tucked into the Yangtze River Valley, surrounded by small mountains, it is regularly fogged in. Inversions trap the pollution. Winters aredamp and cold. Summers are brutally hot AND humid. It's as if God looked at the lousy climate of Chongqing and said, "I'll make up for it with the people I put there."
