Hacker Cinema
The Chinese Mayor
大同
2015 · Film · documentary · 89 min
Directed by Zhou Hao
Once the thriving capital of Imperial China, the city of Datong now lies in near ruins. Not only is it the most polluted city in the country, it is also crippled by decrepit infrastructure and even shakier economic prospects. But Mayor Geng Yanbo plans to change all that, announcing a bold, new plan to return Datong to its former glory, the cultural haven it was some 1,600 years ago. Such declarations, however, come at a devastatingly high cost. Thousands of homes are to be bulldozed, and a half-million of its residents (30 percent of Datong’s total population) will be relocated under his watch. Whether he succeeds depends entirely on his ability to calm swarms of furious workers and an increasingly perturbed ruling elite. The Chinese Mayor captures, with remarkable access, a man and, by extension, a country leaping frantically into an increasingly unstable future.
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2 comments on Hacker News
The US government model and the mindset of people seems to make it very hard to do massive mobilization in a short period of time, compared to countries like China. From which mobilization is very useful in situations like pandemics, or more straightforward, wars.
Of course, there are many advantages from this model. The comparison between these models of governments reminds me of 'the Prince' from Machiavelli. In that book, he compared France with the Ottoman Empire. French king has relatively weak power since the nobles own their fiefs. While the Ottoman Empire there are only province officers, and the sultan can easily move or fire those officers. The comparison seems to echo what the US and China's modern political systems and possibly the pros and cons remain the same.
PS: There's a documentary from the BBC named 'the Chinese Mayor' that might help people have an initial understanding of the Chinese political system from a mayor's perspective. Chinese officers transfer from provinces to provinces in a very frequent manner, in order to avoid the local governments have too much power. This feature remains the same in China for two thousand years.
Yes I witnessed the same thing while visiting 2 years ago, riding the high speed rail from guangzhou to Guilin. Being from California, the experience of riding HSR and seeing too much housing seemed like the polar opposite of California. The documentary, The Chinese Mayor is an interesting watch on the topic: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u06a9Nb2GsU