Director: Making the Film ‘In the Name of Confucius’ Feels Like Going to War
August 6, 2018 Last Updated: August 6, 2018
Can making a film in a peaceful country at a peaceful time feel like going to war? For Doris Liu, director of the documentary “In the Name of Confucius,” the answer is “yes.”
The 52-minute award-winning documentary was screened at the 38th Annual Conference of the North America Taiwanese Professors’ Association in Washington on Aug. 4. It has not yet been released to theaters.
In the film, the camera catches this scene: two groups of people, both mainly Chinese, are confronting each other, with one group waving Chinese red flags and fiercely shouting slogans such as “Down with the Tibetan independentists!”
Among these fiercely shouting men is the slim built Doris Liu. These men bluntly show their anger towards her, and order her to “get out of here.” They didn’t like the fact that she had a cameraman with her and he was obviously filming.
Film maker Doris Liu speaks at the screening of “In the Name of Confucius” before the North America Taiwanese Professors’ Association in Washington on Aug. 4. (Wu Wei/NTD)
The confrontation became so intense that Liu’s soundman, an international student hired by Liu to hold the long boom pole to collect the sound, kept his distance. He had never seen anything like this before.
This is just a very tiny part of the difficulties Liu encountered when she tried to make the documentary, which the Accolade Global Film Competition described as “an exposé filled with shocking details, odious intentions, and an everyday hero who exposes the truth behind a multi-billion-dollar enterprise.”
‘Confucius Institutes’
The “multi-billion-dollar-enterprise” is the Confucius Institutes (CIs), which have found their way into over 1,600 universities and schools worldwide since their inception in 2004.
The CIs are an important part of the Chinese Communist regime’s “soft power” and “external propaganda” strategy. A more internationally tailored translation for “external propaganda” would be “international publicity.”
Liu, a Toronto resident, didn’t know much about the CI until 2013, when the Globe and Mail published a story about Sonia Zhao, a former CI instructor, who defected and filed a discrimination complaint against CI.
As Zhao was also a young woman who just lived about 90-minutes drive away from Liu, Liu became interested in finding out more.
Zhao practices Falun Gong, a spiritual practice that involves doing five meditative exercises and living according to the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. It was banned in China in 1999 and has been brutally persecuted ever since.
Liu saw Zhao’s contract with CI, which clearly stated that to be an instructor for CI, one should and could not practice Falun Gong. By speaking out, Zhao exposed to the world the political agenda of CI.
It was also CI’s policy to avoid topics in the classroom like the Tiananmen Square massacre, Tibet, and Falun Gong. For Liu, who chose to leave China and migrated to Canada in 2005, the “party line” of CI was very obvious.
Battle in Toronto
In 2014, when Canada’s largest school board, the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) was about to open the world’s largest Confucius Institute, an unprecedented public outcry broke out. Opponents and supporters of CI confronted one another fiercely, with Liu and her TV crew caught in the middle, almost physically attacked by the CI supporters, who didn’t like to be filmed.
“It was like a battleground outside the TDSB Education Centre in Toronto. People have never been so divided. However, the majority of both the opponents and supporters of CI were Chinese people from Mainland China,” Liu said. “It suddenly struck me that this battle was about Canadian values, which Canadians might have taken for granted.”
A man who supports opening a Confucius Institute at the Toronto District School Board, shouts at Liu, telling her to get out. (Screenshot/ “In the Name of Confucius”)
“For people who left China to seek freedom and democracy, when they found such a thing like CI had been ‘exported’ to Canada, they realized that they needed to continue the fight to gain what they had been longing for. Good and wonderful things are not easy to gain, and people have to fight and hold fast to them.”
The filming process was like a battle too. Apart from the intense public confrontations, to secure and film interviews with CI officials were also very challenging. As soon as sensitive questions were asked, Liu and her crew could be shown the door.
Sometimes her cameraman was too afraid of the confrontation and suddenly asked for a “leave.” She had to not only urgently find other cameramen, but also give them a very detailed “battle plan” about what to do if confrontations did break out during the interview, and the instruction was, “Keep on recording, no matter what.”
That’s how the audience members are able to see some of the rare scenes in the film “In the Name of Confucius.” Liu said without the “backup” of a few of her very brave former colleagues who once shot for her, she would never have been able to film all the difficult interviews and then present the real scenes to her global audience.
Although recently more and more people from different countries have awakened to the hidden agenda behind the “free gifts” of the CI, Liu noticed a new worrying trend: After realizing that the CI has raising more and more doubts and encountering more and more problems, the Chinese regime is now trying to do the same things that the CI has been doing, but without hanging up a CI sign or saying that this is a CI class.
Liu said the world must guard against this.
On Aug. 1, three days before this most recent screening of “In the Name of Confucius,” the U. S. Senate passed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019, which limits the funding for colleges with CI. With the Confucius Institutes explicitly mentioned and included in the new national defense bill, one might say that Liu is justified to feel that making a film about CI was like going to war.
Doris Liu is surrounded by individuals, some pushing Chinese Communist Party flags in her face, supporting opening a Confucius Institute at the Toronto District School Board, in October 2014 in Toronto. (screenshot, "In the Name of Confucius")
Source: https://www.theepochtimes.com/director-making-the-film-in-the-name-of-confucius-feels-like-going-to-war_2616424.html
