China: A Century of Revolution

Deng Xiaoping in a cowboy hat.

A grainy video of communists caught in Shanghai in the waning days of a civil war, executed with a single bullet to the back of the head.

A son of a landowner talking about how he survived the Cultural Revolution, giving up everything he had to survive.

A mix of footage and eyewitness stories, this epic three part, six hour documentary tells an unforgettable story. This is modern Chinese history everyone from China knows all too well. Yet I know very little but the most general things about the history of China starting in 1911.

This is history you didn't learn in school, and I'm grateful for all the detail, specifically the unforgettable images. The sweep of China's history on the 20th century can be summed up in one word: tumultuous. Tragic is another word that comes to mind.

If you want to understand where China is today, you need to watch this to give your understanding of China some context.

Interpretations of modern Chinese history are often twisted, biased, or perverted one way or another. This rare and unique gem does China's craziest century justitice, with seemingly endless unique video footage and interviews with survivors.

Lenin said that there's decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen. This documentary shows how in China, there's decades where millenia happened.

This documentary has 3 crucial strengths: (1) It's unbiased, showing events as they happened from both sides. (2) It relies heavily on unique primary sources, from multiple sides. (3) It takes the required time to tell everything.

Released in 1989, there were still living sources who had witnessed the end of the Qing empire first hand. It mixes the traumatic retellings of women who suffered through cruel japanese occupation, and that of Japanese soldiers who committed unspeakable horrors. We see rebels and empire supporters, fascisrs and communists, partisans and oppressors, landlords and communal farmers, and eventually Mao Zedong and the people who put a ticket booth next to his coffin.

This is the one must see piece about China's history.