The Warriors of Qiugang (Yale Environment 360)

Like many villages in China’s industrial heartland, Qiugang — a hamlet of nearly 1,900 people in Anhui province — has long suffered from runaway pollution from nearby factories. In Qiugang’s case, three major enterprises with little or no pollution controls churned out chemicals, pesticides, and dyes, turning the local river black, killing fish and wildlife, and filling the air with foul fumes that burned residents’ eyes and throats and sickened children.

The pollution from the Jiucailuo Chemical plant became so egregious that in 2007, Qiugang’s residents — working with a fledgling

ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE

This e360 video, The Warriors of Qiugang, was nominated for a 2011 Academy Award for Best Documentary (Short Subject).

environmental group, Green Anhui — began to try to do something about it. Their efforts soon attracted the attention of Chinese-American filmmaker Ruby Yang, who with cinematographer Guan Xin and longtime collaborator Thomas Lennon, spent the ensuing three years chronicling the struggle of Qiugang’s increasingly emboldened population to curb the pollution that was poisoning them in their homes, schools, and fields.

This exclusive e360 video report, “The Warriors of Qiugang” — co-produced by Yale Environment 360 — tells the story of how the villagers fought to transform their environment, and, in the process, found themselves transformed as well.

The 39-minute video focuses on an unlikely hero — farmer Zhang Gongli, now almost 60, who leads the village’s fight to shut down the chemical plant. Soft-spoken and easy-going, but with a backbone of steel, Zhang — who has only a middle-school education — quickly learns how to use China’s more stringent federal environmental laws to put pressure on the factory owners and their cronies in local and regional government.

“We are sorry to be born in this place,” says Zhang, “but we had no choice. This was forced upon us.”

The camera follows Zhang as he deals with threats from local thugs, rallies his neighbors, and travels to Beijing, where he attends a heady meeting of China’s emerging environmental movement. Zhang — like so many other Chinese — finds himself plunged into a new and wholly unfamiliar world.

“I feel scared — I really don’t want to be a hero,” Zhang says as he rides the train to Beijing. “But the next generation will suffer. We risk our lives for their happiness.” 

Watch the video


ABOUT THIS VIDEO
“The Warriors of Qiugang” was co-produced by Yale Environment 360 with filmmakers Ruby Yang and Thomas Lennon, who have made a trilogy of short films set in China — the first of which, “The Blood of Yingzhou District,” won the 2006 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short. In addition to the Oscar, Yang, who lives and works in Beijing, has won numerous international awards for her documentary and dramatic films. Lennon’s work in documentary film has won the field’s most coveted honors: three Academy Award nominations, two duPont-Columbia awards, two George Foster Peabody and Writer’s Guild Awards, and two national Emmys.