They’re accidental journalists. And in modern China, home of an equivocal law banning “inciting subversion of state power,” the accident is not necessarily a happy one. In the award-winning documentary High Tech, Low Life, Steve Maing (CAS’97, COM’97) follows two popular Chinese bloggers as they illuminate the untold and circumvent the ever-watchful authorities.

Zhang Shihe, aka Tiger Temple, and Zhou Shuguang, aka Zola, investigate, champion, and inform. They don’t do this for a living. One admits he doesn’t even “know what journalism is.” Yet as Maing chronicles the journeys of these two citizen journalists—a young vegetable seller and a retired advertising professional—their gritty, brave reporting spotlights hastily whitewashed murders, draws antigovernment stories from down-at-the-heel farmers, and highlights the state-trampled rights of householders.

Maing says he was drawn to Tiger Temple and Zola because of their combination of the everyday and extraordinary: “They’re average Chinese citizens expanding their freedom of speech in an evolving censorship environment. They take very calculated risks and make educated guesses about what they can and can’t get away with; there can be a scary element to that, but one they learn to navigate.”

At first, Maing wondered if one of those risks might be talking to him. That was until he checked with Zola, the blogging vegetable seller, who admitted he’d already posted the filmmaker’s picture online, saying, “The police read my blog, so I would imagine they’ll let me know soon enough if they have a problem with you filming.” Still, says Maing, until the last, he was ready to pull High Tech, Low Life—five years in the making and cut from more than 600 hours of footage—if it appeared to put either protagonist in danger.

The film was never intended to be a crusade; Maing’s interest began with the people, not the cause. “I aspired to make a film that complicated people’s notions of China. We wanted to make a film that didn’t create these fixed messages or a fixed moralization about what is right and what is wrong,” he says. “The things I expected them not to be able to do, they were able to do, and then things I thought there’d be less problems with, had more problems.”

High Tech, Low Life, which aired on PBS in 2013 and is now available on DVD, shows that censorship in China is complicated and capricious. What “inciting subversion” means might be anyone’s guess, but citizen journalists like Tiger Temple and Zola are determined to find out.