An empowering tale of two grids

Documentary shows how China and UK, despite the geographical distance, faced and overcame similar energy transition challenges, Zheng Zheng reports in Shanghai.

When British documentary director Arthur Jones returned to the Qinghe Power Plant in China's Liaoning province last year, he witnessed a transformation that exceeded his expectations from his last visit in 2021.

During that winter of 2021, while finishing his documentary about the plant, Jones, made a promise: "If this plant survives, I will return." This simple pledge has now materialized into a new documentary that parallels the industrial transformations of China and the United Kingdom.

Return to Qinghe, a 30-minute Sino-British coproduction featured as a continuation of the stories from China on the Move Season 2, weaves together the story of Li Jia, a 29-year-old power plant employee in northeastern China, with Jones' own family history in Yorkshire, England's industrial heartland. The documentary, produced by Jones, 52, explores how two communities, despite their geographical distance, share similar experiences in navigating energy transition challenges.

The project took shape when Li's lecture at a speech competition accounting the transformation of the power plant, My Appointment with Arthur Jones, reached both Jones and the documentary's Chinese director, Jin Dan. Li's account of the plant's progress toward clean energy drew Jones back to Qinghe.

"I've been interested in environmental issues since my teens," says Jones, who has lived in China for over two decades. "When we first filmed at Qinghe, the plant was facing bankruptcy. Coming back in 2024, we found not just survival but transformation as wind turbines now dot the landscape where coal operations once dominated."

The parallel narratives emerged naturally from Jones' own background. "I grew up in South Yorkshire, surrounded by coal mines and power plants," he recalls. "I was about 8 or 9 when the miners' strike happened in the 1980s. The contexts differ — China's transition is purely environmental, while Britain's was marked by political conflict — these parallel experiences deserve comparison, not for judgment but for understanding."