Across the previous four chapters, we have seen how independent Chinese docu¬mentary has grown from a marginal, underground practice in the 1990s to the basis of an alternative public sphere in the digital era. Filmic texts are circulated within this public sphere that challenge and contest the party-state's cultural hegemony in a variety of ways by offering grassroots perspectives on issues such as urban development, the representation of history, and the rule of law. In this final chapter we will consider a particular group of Chinese documentaries of the past fifteen years that have probed in increasingly reflective ways the very act of documentary making itself. Specifically, these films examine the ethics of encounter underpinning the interpersonal approach to documentary now common in China's independent realm.

One of the most sophisticated examples of the reflective turn in Chinese documentary is Zhao Liang's Petition (Shangfang, 2009), in which the filmmaker encourages reflection upon the ethics of encounter between a documentary maker and a group of highly persecuted and disempowered Chinese citizens. Zhao's work contributes to a wider discourse around questions of personal ethics and responsibility that has been developing both inside and outside official chan¬nels in China in recent years. His complex, ethically reflective approach to the documentary form makes Petition a particularly challenging work, both in terms of the sharpness of its political critique and the emotionally confronting nature of the ethical dilemmas Zhao represents on screen.

This chapter's detailed analysis of Zhao's ethically reflective style will be preceded by a discussion of the widespread perception of a moral and ethical crisis in Chinese society today, as the efficacy of ethical precepts promoted by the party-state has faded and the marketised economy has encouraged intensely competitive individualism. Alongside the introduction of an economy character¬ised by cutthroat competition, the state has continued to resist the formation of grassroots organisations that might assist in the ground-up development of ethics more suited to an increasingly individualistic society. Nevertheless, such organisations continue to spring up spontaneously, such as the Care and Love group Ai Xiaoming documents in her eponymous documentary. Independent documentary culture has also functioned as a grassroots realm within which ethical debates have played out among a viewing public, and these debates have in turn been expressed in a series of ethically reflective documentary works.