Thirty years of footage from mainland archived at California university

American documentary producer Bill Einreinhofer's love of film began early while in high school, and he admits that his incredible career spanning five decades capturing life through a lens has given him a charmed existence, and one where he still enjoys the art of making documentaries and has been fortunate enough to travel the world and meet people from a variety of cultures, including China.

Einreinhofer, 74, from Rutherford, New Jersey began his career in the late 1970s after graduating with a history degree from Saint Peter's University in New Jersey in 1974 and earning a master's degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is chair emeritus of the Broadcast Journalism department at the New York Film Academy and heads a company called Paradox Communications. He has also taught students in Asia.

The three-time Emmy Award-winning television and documentary filmmaker joined WNET as a production assistant in October 1976. He produced his first WNET documentary in the spring of 1977. He has developed and produced programming and news for PBS, CBS, ABC, Discovery and HBO. His documentary films on China run the gamut, delighting audiences with moments and unique storytelling about history, people, places and moments.

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In an exclusive interview with China Daily in New York, the filmmaker shared his approach to his work and the lessons he's learned as an American doing work in and about China for over 30 years.

"You know, one of the great challenges in working on stories about China is you have 5,000 years of history," he says. "And even in a documentary, you only have a limited amount of time. So, it's trying to grant one particular area, one particular person, one particular era, to explore."

His work on China taught him how to work across cultures, a valuable lesson that he says anyone can embrace at any level.

"Frankly, I think the best American ambassadors to China are those Americans who go and visit China," he said. "And the best Chinese diplomats, when it comes to the United States, are Chinese visitors who come to the United States, who meet Americans and can quickly dispel a lot of the strange, false stories they may have heard."

His enormous body of work means that he has one of the largest privately held libraries of footage about China in North America, he said.

Looking back to the start, he explained that in the early 1990s, he decided to do a program about the Chinese space program. He got lucky as it was "fresh territory" and not a topic that was widely known by American audiences at the time. But it was challenging because he didn't know anybody in China.

Fortunately, he had an intern, a postgraduate student from New York University's School of Journalism who was on sabbatical, but was a reporter for CCTV. Einreinhofer was able to use the student's contacts, go to China, get the story, come back and make the film and put it on public TV. He added that he likes to ind hidden stories that are not in the news, or that people don't know about what it is like to live in China.

He first visited Beijing in 1989 to work on Innovation, the long-running PBS science, health and technology series that he conceived and executive produced.

After that shoot, he recalls thinking that "at that point, I thought, 'well, okay, that's it when it comes to China.' But what I discovered was that, because I worked there, people would come to me, clients would come to me and they said 'look, we need something done in China. You've been there before, we're going to send you.'"

Today, his long list of documentary films includes China Now: To Get Rich Is Glorious; So Very Far From Home; The Hidden China; Shanghai 1937: Where World War II Began; Unsettled History: America, China and the Doolittle Tokyo Raid; Valor and Memory and others.

Your Serve or Mine, his 2025 documentary, was about the history of Ping-Pong Diplomacy in the 1970s that helped lay the groundwork for the normalization of US-China relations. The era demonstrated the power of personal contact between people to build bridges.

In that spirit of cooperation, he believes that the coming summit between President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping in Washington, DC is a good step in continuing communication between the world's two largest economies.

"Today some commentators say that the relationship between America and China is bad. Well, I remember when there was no relationship at all. So, in that sense, it's definitely an improvement. I think the key is listening to understand what is being said, because sometimes that goes beyond the words."

He recalls fondly what he dubs the "incredible accident" involving American ping-pong player Glenn Cowan at the 1971 World Table Tennis Championship in Nagoya, Japan.

He missed his team bus and mistakenly boarded the Chinese national team's bus. And even though he didn't speak Chinese and the Chinese athletes didn't speak English, the three-time world champion ping-pong player Zhuang Zedong found a way to communicate with him through an interpreter.

When Cowan got off the bus at the competition, he was seen smiling and shaking hands with Zhuang, who had presented him with a Yellow Mountain silk weaving art piece on April 4, 1971.

"Well, this is news," Einreinhofer remembers people thinking at the time. Journalists took countless photos of the two players and those images were widely circulated worldwide.

After the US accepted an invitation to travel to China and play exhibition matches against the Chinese team, it put in motion the start of the two countries beginning to connect and speak to each other. It was a big step forward, as there were no diplomatic ties and few contacts between the US and China after 1949.

"In the early 1970s, that was an era when, yes, America and China had no relationship, period," he adds. "And in public, there was this profound disagreement about virtually everything. But what the public didn't know, in fact, what many people in the government didn't know, is that the leadership in China and the leadership in the United States really wanted to talk to each other, but they couldn't ind out a way to do it."

US president Richard Nixon's historic trip to China in February 1972 made him the first sitting US president to travel there. Along with Henry Kissinger, then assistant to the president for national security affairs, Nixon met Chairman Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai, a major step toward normalization between the two nations.

"Personally, I believe in the importance of people-to-people diplomacy," Einreinhofer said. "They provide a back channel, if you will, for communication, for things you can't necessarily say in front of the cameras, under the bright lights. Ideas you can try out, questions that may be a little forward.

"And as much as I think it is important for our leaders to meet, I would hope that the leaders also have an opportunity to meet some of their fellow countrymen who have been to this other place, who have specialized in this other place, to hear the story they have to tell, because there is wisdom in those stories, and often it helps us look beyond the very real differences that we have," he said.

His early years working in news taught him to respect the people who he was covering as they often shared amazing things with him on camera that they may not have told their families or friends.

He revealed that their trust makes him protective of their stories. His advice to would-be filmmakers is to "stop talking", as the ability to listen is a skill in documentary filmmaking.

During his many trips to China, he says he was struck by people's kindness after his day-to-day filming stopped.

"One of the things I learned was just how welcoming the Chinese people can be," he said. "There's a famous old saying, which I cannot say in Mandarin, but basically says that it's wonderful to be able to greet a friend from afar.

"And, so, time and time again, I was that friend from afar and people I was working with, people who I covered, they'd invite me into their homes. They'd take me out to dinner because as Chinese, they felt this responsibility to be welcoming."

Over the years, he has also witnessed the "remarkable" changes and development that created modern China.

He said he hopes that student and art exchanges between the US and China continue. He described the "50,000 in five years" initiative proposed by Xi and its completion two and a half years early as "an incredible success".

His large body of work is now archived by The University of Southern California and is called the Bill Einreinhofer China Archive.

Hosted by USC's East Asian Library, the vast collection includes more than 1,000 digital videos, textiles, images and audio. The material is available for use by students, researchers and the public. Some of it is accessible online.

"As much as I like to think of myself as youthful, the fact of the matter is at 74, I am not," he says candidly. "And over the course of over three decades, I put together what turned out to be one of the largest privately held libraries of Chinese footage about China in North America."

When USC and the East Asian library expressed an interest in archiving the material and making it available to just about everyone online, he thought it was a "wonderful idea".

He likes the fact that anybody who is interested can tap into the material. "To me, that was very, very exciting," he says proudly. He adds more of his work to the archive after each new project.

His latest documentary — America's Main Street: I-80 — is a journey through 11 states united by a common road and common dreams. It will air on PBS this November.

As the debate around artificial intelligence heats up, he revealed that he is already incorporating it into another film project that is still in the works.

Called The Forgotten General, it is about American General Jonathan Wainwright, the highest-ranking American to be held captive in a Japanese prisoner of war camp during World War II.

He is working with famed Chinese director, Fang Li, who directed The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru.

But after doing some research he realized it was going to be difficult to represent Wainwright's experience as a POW visually, because there aren't sufficient pictures or film.

He has been searching for still photos, and 60-millimeter and 35-mm film of other Japanese POW camps and other POWs, for the AI to use as a basis to create animations.

He says that if he didn't have the film or pictures, AI would be "dreaming up whatever it thinks things might have looked like".

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So, by using real documents, he keeps the AI grounded in reality.

As he reflects on his storied career, he visibly struggles to name his favorite film and compares it to a parent of multiple children being asked to name their favorite child — an impossible task.

But when it comes to which documentary he thinks had the most impact worldwide, he points to Beyond Beijing, a four-part documentary series that covered six cities other than Beijing that hosted 2008 Olympic events.

He estimates that it was watched by hundreds of millions of people worldwide, as it was distributed in 43 countries, including China.

"It's a humbling experience because these people are putting faith in me that I'm telling them the true story; that I am being evenhanded in telling that story. And so, I appreciate the audience. And knowing that that audience is out there, it keeps me striving to maintain the level of honesty that I contributed to all of my projects," he says thoughtfully.

Contact the writers at belindarobinson@chinadailyusa.com