Up the Yangtze (2007) is a tricky documentary. It has a slow, gentle pace that makes it seem at first glance to be as far removed from a dramatic, opinionated Michael Moore documentary as possible. As the Canadian director and his China-born father (we never see them) cruise up the Yangtze on a “farewell tour” before it is flooded for the world’s biggest hydro-electric project, we follow the lives of two young people working on the boat, a brash young man who is the product or victim of China’s one-child policy, and, primarily, a 16-year old girl from a poor, illiterate family who live in a shack on the riverbank and grow their own vegetables. The triumph of the film is to gain intimate access to the girl’s family—washing the cat, picking corn, discussing the family’s survival, and moving by carrying it up the banks on their backs.
The easy-going, respectful, and gracious look belies the fact that the director advocates a position on the Three Gorges Dam every bit as insistently as Michael Moore advocates a position in his polemical documentaries. This becomes clear if you ask what Up the Yangtze does not tell you. It documents meticulously what is being lost by China’s modernization, but what does it show about what is being gained? We see only urban concrete jungles with slender women sporting Western fashions, and we see is some detail a luxury cruise boat where the gap between the Chinese staff and the rich Western tourists is clear and awkward. Is there nothing else? The film shows the negative effects of the Three Gorges Dam, as we see the farmer’s house and land flood in time-lapse photography, but never once do we hear why the dam was build or what benefits it might bring.
While Up the Yangtze failed as a documentary on the Three Gorges Dam or the wider issue of modernization in China, it succeeded in giving a behind-the-scenes look into a poor Chinese farming family and a modernizing cruise boat staffed by a complex mix of young Chinese people. I feel privileged to have met the family, and I will never look at a tourist operation such as the cruise ship the same way again.