Product Details

• Format: Color, NTSC
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Wgbh Boston
• VHS Release Date: March 28, 2000
• Run Time: 60 minutes
• ASIN: B00000F0PH
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #328,919 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

As seen in movie footage, October 1949 was a time of exhilarating celebrations in Beijing. The Communists led by Mao had finally come to power after years of fighting, and the Chinese, the vast majority of whom had suffered in horrendous poverty for generations, reacted joyously. Before long, other government films showed happy businessmen turning over the deeds of the factories to Mao, as their property was now said to belong to the people. The propaganda films hid an ugly truth, the violence and coercion underlying Mao's brand of Communism, as survivors, in moving interviews, recall how factory owners and supervisors were executed. The mass mobilization of China dictated by Mao took peculiar forms: in one example, a nationwide push to produce steel proved to be a colossal and bizarre waste of time and manpower, as the steel produced by crude methods was essentially worthless. In the 1960s Mao sought to counteract any opposition to his policies, solidifying control through the Red Guards, young fanatics who fomented the notorious Cultural Revolution. Both victims of their mad reign and veterans of the Red Guards recall those years when attacks on "bourgeois values" led to terror in every aspect of Chinese life. The history of China under Mao has often seemed mysterious, but this video does an excellent job of putting that sad yet fascinating history into a human context. --Robert J. McNamara

Product Description

"We thought: If we follow Mao, we can't go wrong, only he can lead us from one victory to another... To die for the great leader was an honor." - Zhang Baoquig, Red Guard, Beijing - 1966

In China, Communism got a second chance. Simpler and more radical than the Soviet model, Chinese Communism sprang from the countryside rather than from the city. Mao Zedong tried to build a Communist society free of the corruption and revisionism he believed had derailed the Soviet original.

Beginning with the overthrow of landlords, the people rallied behind Mao. Yet soon, the face of communism changed again when the state took control of the land, and the people, through unrealistic economic programs and production quotas. Only extreme poverty led to a change in course.

When Mao felt China was turning down the capitalist road, he proclaimed a Cultural Revolution, in which unspeakable violence against intellectuals and other subversives swept the country.

The people remember: Mao Zedong, "takeover" of 1949, Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, arrest of Gang of Four, Deng's "Second Revolution," Red Guards, Tiananmen Square.