Zhang Shihe, (September 27, 1953—) known by his artist name Laohu Miao (Tiger Temple), is a native of Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, a citizen journalist, a documentary filmmaker and human rights activist.
Born into a family of CCP cadres, Zhang's father had been a Public Security Bureau official in China’s Northwest, and served as a vice minister of the Ministry of Forestry after the Cultural Revolution.
During the Cultural Revolution, Zhang's parents were persecuted and both imprisoned. He spent several years traveling the country by rail. In 1970, when Zhang was still a teenager, he was sent off to the mountains to help build a railway line.
I was sent to work on the Xi’an to Qinghai railway. More than 190 people died building that. We had to carry 40-pound sacks of cement on our backs. We were teenagers.
Of course, it ruined so many people’s health. Most were broken when they came home. They’d carry two sacks, one on the end of each pole, and carry it up the mountain. Professional track layers did 28 meters a month. We did 37.
After the Cultural Revolution, Zhang worked at a Shaanxi steel mill, and from 1983 to 1990 he opened China's first private bookstore, Tianlai, which was shut down after the 1989 democracy movement because it was unable to sell foreign books and was harassed by the local writers' association.
In the late 1990s, when the Internet took off in China, Zhang began to use the name Tiger Temple, recording what he saw and heard with a video camera, and publishing it online.
In 2004, he filmed a killing in Beijing and published it online, and was then called "the first practitioner of citizen journalism" by several media outlets. Zhang has documented the plight of the grassroots, including miners, displaced persons, and petitioners. He has published nearly 1,000 videos, as well as initiated a number of aid initiatives.
In 2013, the New York Times did a
video profile of Zhang as he biked through China doing reports on the countryside. Today, he is more active on the Chinese short-video site Bilibili, where
he posts video interviews on a variety of topics, including with elderly survivors of the Cultural Revolution or with the Chinese lawyer and public intellectual Chen Hongguo.
For six years, from 2015 to 2021, Zhang was part of a group including Chen and the independent journalist Jiang Xue who ran a public-meeting space in Xi’an called “I Know I Know Nothing” (
zhiwuzhi).
In addition, Zhang is concerned with human rights activism. He has filmed videos and documentaries for Gong Meng, a Beijing-based NGO that provides legal assistance to the disempowered and promotes the New Citizens’ Movement, and one of its founders Xu Zhiyong.
He has also participated in filming a video series entitled “Diligently Strive for Civil Society,” (held by CUA), which interviewed more than 50 activists, artists, scholars etc. about their views on civil society.
In 2011, in the wake of the Arab Spring, Zhang was sent back to Xi’an, where he lives today.
In an interview, Zhang was asked why he continues to make films, even though they cannot be shown in China. He answered that he hopes that he is creating a record for future generations, an ark that can survive the current flood.
“You keep asking me why, but I’m not so good with those theoretical questions,” he said. “I just know I’m going to keep going; it’s my responsibility to history.”
Other resources:
- Ian Johnson, Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future
- 《中国猛博： 新媒体时代的民间话语力量》，编著翟明磊，香港天地图书。
-
My Responsibility to History.
