The Chinese national arts censors asked film director Jia Zhangke to make surprisingly few changes to his new film, "A Touch of Sin," even though it tells embarrassing stories about contemporary China. Why? According to reporter Edward Wong's NY Times article, the answer involves social media's ability to make events part of the public record.

In spite of state oversight, Jia's new film tell stories of individuals grappling with troubling political, economic, and social conditions:

• “In these few years, because of the speed of China’s transformation, I have become very interested in history,” Mr. Jia said. “And I have also become interested in China’s societal problems, its economic problems, its political problems. So I feel now with ‘A Touch of Sin,’ it’s not just an issue of individual emotions, but it is also an expression of the state of the entire nation.... Reform has brought about many problems.... Prominent among these are the problem of social inequality and problems such as distribution of income.”

Now Jia is telling the stories of individuals lashing out violently against the conditions of their lives, which could easily have tempted the state censors to react more firmly than they did, in the interests of good national publicity. Jia has become just the kind of artist a country touchy about the control of image and information would censor. But social media was already playing a public role.

Thanks to "the world of Twitter-like microblogs, which many Chinese have been reading in recent years to get the unvarnished daily news and opinions that are all but absent from the state-run news media," the four interwoven stories in this movie, and other stories like them, were already part of the public record. This fact, the director suggests, protected his film from strong censorship. The kind of stories he was telling had already broken out:

• The news articles on which the film was based had already made the rounds on microblogs. The narratives had entered the public consciousness in a way that might never have happened 10 or even five years ago, before the Internet became such a social force in China.

But even though the news was out, Jia points out that these violent episodes are not well understood there "because society has never had a widespread discussion of the problem." Here a distinction is made between the attention that is drawn and paid via social media and the kinds of discussions that form a national consensus and then shape policy. As an artist, he heard the evidence and witness of the microblogs and Internet news feeds, but still saw the nation in a state of emergency requiring a response: “Certain things need to be said, and need to be said directly, clearly, to as large, and as activated, a Chinese audience as possible.” Because social media attuned people to the crisis, but could not resolve the crisis, it was a necessary but not sufficient tool for Chinese society facing its problems. Other arts and other institutions need to be healthy and active in order to work the issues further.

Edward Wong's article helps us understand more exactly the nature of social media--not a replacement for other forms of media and other institutions but a necessary widening of a society's toolkit. A way of preparing the ground for more focused national conversations and a way of keeping the pressure on. The chatter on a Twitter or Weibo can swell into political awareness but the working out of a national consensus about action probably cannot be completed there. Great social decisions are not, so far, anyway, made on Twitter.

It might be interesting to think more, too, about why Jia told these stories in a familiar martial arts genre--perhaps audiences can empathize and understand challenging material more readily through the lens of a familiar kind of story? I don't know.

["Filmmaker Giving Voice to Acts of Rage in Today’s China," NY Times, 9/14/13]