只有一个地球

Introduced by Dr. Siqi Tu. 

Followed by a talk with Chen Jue 陈爵 & Kuang Yang 邝杨

A pioneering four-part environmental documentary series produced by CCTV that did not pass censorship and has never screened publicly. Only One Earth approaches ecological crisis through an experimental, essayistic lens shaped by the concerns of reform-era Chinese intellectuals. It confronts the toll of global industrialization using literary, academic, and archival materials alongside a visual style influenced by experimental cinema. 

Siqi Tu（屠思齐) vis a Chinese sociologist at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, where her research focuses on social inequality, work, and everyday governance in contemporary China. Through long-term fieldwork, she examines how institutional change is experienced at the level of households, communities, and ordinary lives.

Chen Jue ( 陈爵) spent his career working at China Central Television (CCTV), where he directed documentaries that explored social change during the reform era. From environmental damage to education, migration, and daily work, his films show how political and economic shifts shape ordinary lives in China, sometimes in ways that proved difficult to broadcast.

Kuang Yang (邝杨) is a Chinese sociologist trained at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the key intellectual force behind the SWYC group’s documentary work in the late 1980s. He wrote the narration and collaborated on the screenplays for Only One Earth, Tiananmen, and Notes from Beijing, bringing social analysis into public television at a brief moment of institutional openness.