[5] Ai Xiaoming was born in 1953 in the city of Wuhan with a name meaning 'bright dawn', a name typical of the period to show reverence to the new Party government.
[6] Despite Tang's affiliation with the Kuomintang administration, the family was relatively privileged, and Ai's father worked as an English teacher.
[6] In 1974, as the party was beginning to launch broad rehabilitation campaigns, Ai was admitted to Central China Normal University in Wuhan based on her relation to former officials.
She explained in interviews that she wanted to use film to break through shame, expose injustice, promote social awareness and make visible things that are not normally spoken about.
[10] Despite this observational style, Ai considers herself as deeply involved in the activism that she documents, describing in an interview her filming as a form of "participatory action".
"[9] In 2008, Ai was an initial signatory to the Charter 08 manifesto that was drawn up and circulated by Liu Xiaobo and called for moderate political and civil rights for Chinese citizens.
[11] Ai would end up producing three documentary films on the disaster, relying heavily on an observational style, interviews with affected individuals and the heavy incorporation of dramatic - and sometimes highly graphic - footage recorded by eyewitnesses.
Authorities refused to renew her passport preventing her from travelling to Paris to accept the Simone de Beaurvoir price, and also from attending a documentary film festival in Hong Kong.
The film centres on recording the testimony of survivors from the Jiabiangou labour camp that operated in Gansu during the Great Leap Forward famine.
Her film ties together the themes of past suffering and continued repression and emphasises how the suppression of historic truths remains a significant issue in modern China.
[17] Ai Xiaoming was living in her home in Wuhan during the initial COVID-19 outbreak, and was placed under lockdown along with the rest of the city in late January 2020.
[6] Ai took part in the initial social mobilisation in response to the outbreak and helped organised supplies and 600,000 yuan in donations to local health officials.
[18] Her first article focused on Dr. Li Wenliang, a health-care worker who alerted colleagues of the severity of the outbreak and was initially punished by officials before dying of the virus himself in early February.
[6] This post exemplified Ai's multi-modal style of journaling, which was described by the Los Angeles Review of Books as a "smorgasbord of literary and visual forms", even including a play written in text through the diary.