Commissions

Greenlit: Secrets of China, BBC3

As Billie travels from the world-famous Great Wall, through Gotham-like megacities, to China’s only tropical island, she discovers what’s most important to Chinese young people, including marriage money, and national pride. She’ll compare their everyday lives with the life she knows in the UK, and see how China sometimes has its own ways of dealing with problems also faced across the world, from internet addiction to economic meltdown.

Billie also witnesses some of China’s unique phenomena, both old and new. At Chinese New Year she is part of the biggest human migration on the planet. She visits one of the world’s largest mass-dating events, and sees how China’s youth pay tribute to the State by raising flags and marching in ranks. Twenty-first century China is a nation discovering new ways to enjoy itself, and Billie meets obsessive gamers, beach virgins and millionaire party animals.

Episode 1: Fit In or Fail – In the first episode, Billie explores growing up the Chinese way, where respect for State and elders is being drilled into China’s next generation. If you don’t fit in, you are often seen as a failure. She spends a day in the life of the children at a special bootcamp deep in the middle of China. After disobeying their parents, the children have been sent there on a nine month course in discipline, away from friends, family and creature comforts, which they must pass.

Billie joins them for a taste of the camp’s toughest challenge: two weeks of marching through the smoggy landscape, along dusty roads, sleeping in trucks along the way. She spends time with 16-year-old Qingyu, who’s been running away from home and drinking. Her mother wants her to learn to be ‘normal’, which in China means no going out and no boyfriends.

A third of the boys in the camp face addiction problems, but not from drink or drugs. They’re hooked on online gaming and their parents believe it’s destroying their lives.

But professional gaming is also a huge phenomenon in China and Billie travels to Shanghai to meet the superstars and their diehard fans. For the players it’s an opportunity to make huge amounts of money in their teens and early 20s, but it’s a spectator sport too. Billie gets to go the national championships and a look inside one team’s club house, where the star players live together and play China’s most popular game, League Of Legends, all day long.

Episode 2: Desperate for Love –  If you think finding love is tough in the UK, spare a thought for single people in China. Billie JD Porter gets inside a country where marrying before you’re 28 is a national obsession and a matter of family honour. The Communist authorities even advised its citizens against staying single, warning that they may be seen as ‘leftovers’.

Billie investigates the extremes people go to find somebody to marry – marriage markets, dating bootcamps, and even plastic surgery are used to increase marriage potential. She immerses herself in China’s £50 billion wedding industry where couples will spend up to three years of their salary to create elaborate wedding experiences from underwater wedding photography to group ceremonies on a paradise island.

But Billie also tracks down a growing group of young Chinese who are resisting the pressure to settle down young, and discovers the consequences of rebelling in a country built on loyalty and obedience.

Episode 3: How to Get Rich – In a whirlwind tour of China’s holiday hotspots at Chinese New Year, Billie JD Porter explores the state of the Chinese economy.

She begins her journey in China’s industrial heartland, Guangzhou. It’s a vast modern metropolis dominated by huge factories and skyscrapers. There she sees two sides to China’s recent boom – meeting a struggling migrant worker couple from the countryside and some super-rich supercar owners. But as Chinese growth slows, the State is finding other ways of keeping the economy going…

Billie heads to Hainan, a tropical island in the South China Sea, for the Chinese New Year celebrations. This place holds the key to China’s continued economic expansion: leisure and tourism. She samples beach-life Chinese style, visits the world’s largest duty free mall and second largest golf resort, and has a go at caddying alongside some of the thousands of workers for whom this is a new type of job. But will all these extraordinary new leisure attractions tempt enough Chinese people to part with their cash and keep the economy moving forwards?

Channel: BBC3

TX: 25th August 2015

Source: BBC press release