Dust lung: suffering, spectatorship, and the ethics of witnessing in Chinese independent documentary culture

This paper examines how contemporary Chinese independent documentaries represent pneumoconiosis workers and their entanglement with dust, labor, and disposability. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of “wasted lives,” alongside theories of slow violence and transcorporeality, it argues these films function as counter-visual practices that not only document structural neglect but also reframe the ethical and political value of marginalized lives in the public sphere. The first section explores how documentaries construct a “dust landscape,” a visual ecology of industrial decay in which environmental degradation blurs the boundary between laboring bodies and ruined environments. Here, dust operates both as toxic material and as a metaphor for the erasure of vulnerable workers from developmentalist narratives of progress. The second section turns to the affective and embodied dimensions of illness, analyzing how pneumoconiosis patients are portrayed within intimate familial settings. These representations move beyond spectacle, showing how suffering is lived and negotiated within precarious kinship structures. The final section examines the ethics of circulation and reception, highlighting how digital platforms, participatory practices, and audience responses shape meaning. By situating filmmaker, subject, and viewer in a triangulated relation of visibility, these documentaries challenge dominant logics of productivity and open space for revaluing life through care, memory, and resistance.