Chinese Documentary Creation From The Perspective Of Local China

The concept of "Soil China" was originally proposed in the book From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society, which was written by the famous sociologist Fei Xiaotong in 1947. It is a sociological concept coining the traditional Chinese social conditions and cultural characteristics. It specifically refers to the interpersonal relationships and the social networks constructed by blood (family and clan relations) and geopolitical relationship (settlement). "Soil China" is a special system embodied in the specific traditional Chinese grassroots society and it is a describing of the image of traditional Chinese which is constituted by fixed geographical landscape, rituals and moral conventions and stable cultural traditions. Documentary becomes an important medium form to record social formation of Soil China and carry traditional ethics and values, for its documentary quality and humanistic characteristic. Documentaries recording Soil China can be divided into several stages, the stage of video recordings fragmented local and folk activities, the stage of showing the country and nationality images, the stage of looking for the roots of traditional culture and civilian documentary, and the stage of discovering nostalgia and aesthetic style. In every stage, it demonstrates different record ideas, value appeal and aesthetic style, according to the impacts of the times background and cultural environment. By depicting serene elegance of the natural landscape, showing simple and honest folk customs and mining heavy and refined human spirit, documentaries completes the image writing of Soil China. Based on the desire of showing national cultural soft power and promoting cultural exchanges between China and the West, we bring up several communication strategies such as fitting strange themes with commonality values, individual videos highlighting humanity communication, and international vision seeking "common view" of intercultural communication.