Eric Campbell

You think that's nothing special, but all the years I was in China, despite massive protests going on every day, we couldn't film them.

We were so leashed by the authorities.

You'll find the roads are blocked.

You get your camera out, your hands are over the camera.

It's almost impossible.

And for years, there was no actual clear footage of a protest in China, just a

A few sort of long images that, you know, one of the protesters had taken that they managed to smuggle out.

And during the Olympics, they had to briefly loosen the restrictions to meet their commitments to the IOC.

So we're able to do a few things we couldn't do normally.

But China kept a very good kind of lid on the reality of the unrest that was going on and is still going on.

I mean, Chiang Kai-shek, the nationalist leader, was as ruthless as any of the communists in repression, possibly even more so if you look at the...

the massacres that took place in Taiwan.

And the extraordinary shift that came after Li Dongwei introduced democracy, despite all the warnings that China could never embrace democracy, it's not in the Chinese character.

And it just exploded and they loved it, you know, which rather puts the lie to, you know, China's insistence on the need for a

A one-party state under the wise leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.

It's totally free now.

It's bureaucratic.

It's incredibly bureaucratic.

I call it the last outpost of Soviet central planning to get anything done or to speak to a minister's office or anything.

But, you know, they do talk to you.