Review of Wild China (2008)
Seen in 2017.
About equal parts anthropology and nature documentary. Awkward. Made with government permission on the occasion of the Olympics, it dances around the problems of pollution and overpopulation, showing lovely tourist destinations, animals extinct in the wild and, in episode 5, Mao’s “traditional” medicine, which is not even superficially compared to science-based medicine. The tone gets a bit more serious in the last episode, covering the toxic Yangtze and other estuaries. It’s probably a decent optimistic overview and includes some amazing geological features.
References here: Japan: Earth’s Enchanted Islands (2015), Mountain: Life at the Extreme (2017).