Original subtitles

[crash]

[footsteps running]

♪acappella singing in foreign language♪

♪Eastern music♪

-[woman VO] Any look at China is bound to be loaded with

questions.

Her visible faces are minuscule compared to her unknown ones.

Or, is this true?

♪gong♪

The name of the game used to be "shoot for the contents."

Explain.

What's your desire here?

I've heard that in Ancient China,

fung shee -- which refers to people,

places, and cultures removed from the central court -- dealt

mostly with the areas of knowledge Confucius refused to

discuss, mainly strange events, spirts,

and fate.

Fung shee influence was significant in many areas of

culture, including court social life.

One of the games it offers as entertainment at the dinner

parties of the rich and powerful is this game Shoot for the

Contents, or Guessing the Contents.

I used to be fascinated by the master of this art of

divination, Quan Lou, not only because he could guess up to

13-odd items placed inside a closed container -- there was

rarely a miss, naming them off one by one -- but more so

because he could spin so acutely and poetically such complex

interpretations of the signs of the universe.

-This is just a shot in the dark.

-There are three items.

Make a guess at any one of them.

-Let's see.

It's not quite an object.

-Right.

-Begins with a "B."

-Wrong.

-Begins with a "D."

Neither human nor quite animal.

Its miraculous changes are inscrutable.

Comes from water and has five colors.

Can be as small as a circle, or as large as the world.

It changes without fixed aid and moves up and down without fixed

time.

-When it is a he, he is as red as fire.

And when it is a she, she has a body like flat waves.

-It's linked directly to the ruling class.

It is nine animal forms: the horns of a deer,

the ears of an ox, the eyes of a hare,

the body of a snake covered with the skins of a carp,

the belly of a frog, and the paws of a tiger and the claws of

an eagle.

The beast can actually be trained to the point where you

can ride upon its back.

But on the underside of its throat,

it has scales a foot across that grow back from the body and

anyone who brushes against it is sure to die.

This was a hard-faced metaphor for the Chinese ruler who was to

represent the Chinese people: a docile yet potentially dangerous

dragon.

-That was creation.

The dragon expresses the idea of proverb and change.

-[woman VO] There is a thousand trillion Chinas,

as a Chinese storyteller would say -- the China of people's

imagining.

The Beijing Review was quite vocal in condemning

all this talk about China being an enigma as it keeps on

changing its policies.

They said it is quite off the mark for observers abroad to

think of changes in politics as an indication of instability.

Well, in the art of reading mountains,

it is said that to find the dragon,

one must first find its ancestors.

Interpreting orientation and form is not without risk,

because in the ancient books, the beast exists in a thousand

forms.

It has 10.000 aspects, stands and crouches,

it's huge, or tiny, unruly or obedient,

reserved or extravagant.

Infinitely in metamorphosis, it dives deep,

rises high, meanders, coils, leaps,

and takes its flight.

♪Eastern music♪

With Mao's suspicion of intellectuals,

bookworms like yourself and your friends will fit right into one

of the 10 categories of rightists.

Yes, you would either be a revisionist,

a right opportunist, or a rightist.

In any case, the stinking number nine.

-[woman VO] Oh!

What about the Two 100s policy that have survived Mao?

-[woman VO] Well, history seems to repeat itself.

What happened over 30 years ago?

In 1956, Mao did initiate a period of public debate and

party rectification under the slogan,

"Let a hundred flowers blossom.

Let a hundred schools of thought contend."

His speech had first provoked no reaction;

China's intellectuals had learned to distrust all official

sugar-coated decorations of this kind.

But in June 1957, the hundred flowers began to bloom

furiously, and the result was devastating for the regime.

The leaders responded to these unexpectedly virulent

criticisms by launching an immediate counteroffensive,

thereby reopening a ruthless weeding-out campaign,

angered and covering the poisonous weeds hidden among the

fragrant flowers.

Mao's hundred flowers wilted in the heat of the short-lived but

fiercely critical voices of students and intellectuals who

opposed reciting blindly all the directives of the party and

questioned the party's right to monopolize political power.

-[man] [foreign language]

-[translator VO] Right now in China, there is no such thing as

independent filmmaking, because there are two meanings

to independent filmmaking: one, that it has independence and

investment decisions; second, that it has independence in

distribution.

In the US, the decision to make what kind of film is really up

to the situation of the market, and so it is more free.

However in China, very often the kind of film that is going to be

shown, going to be made, is decided according to political

needs of the moment, because in China,

all filmmaking enterprises are in the hands of the state.

Although film studios can decide themselves what film they

want to make, but afterwards it all has to pass through state

censorship.

So if you pass through state censorship and it's approved,

then you can distribute the film.

If it doesn't pass, then you can't.

The criteria for censorship, uh,

one of them is, um, the political content.

They want to make sure that it is politically correct,

if you have made any political mistakes in your film.

-[man] [foreign language]

-The second criteria is to look at whether there are any sex

scenes or violent scenes.

-[man] [foreign language]

-A few years ago, some people tried to experiment in the

direction of independent filmmaking.

However, once they made the film,

they had to deliver it over to the state film distribution

corporation, and as a result of that,

they didn't make hardly any money at all.

-[man] [foreign language]

-So there are two reasons for the difficulties of this kind of

experiment: on the one hand is that they have so little money

that they can't really make a decent film,

and so they don't have an audience.

The other reason is that no matter how good a film they

make, and no matter how welcome the film is in terms of the

audience, how much the audience wants to see it,

if it doesn't meet with the approval of the higher-ups,

then it won't be released at all or will have limited release.

-[man] [foreign language]

-So a few people who experimented just gave up.

Although American filmmaking can be considered all-around

independent -- and there's a lot of freedom -- at the same time,

there are aspects of the system which means that,

uh, it doesn't really have freedom -- it has limitations to

its freedom -- and that is because it is limited by the

demands of the market.

-[man] [foreign language].

-The boss of the film, uh, his eyes always has to be focused on

the expressions on the audience's face.

-[man] [foreign language]

-So although in China, films are subject to all sorts of

political censorship, however, at the same time,

you get the situation where you can point to the superiority of

Socialism in that some film studios can support experimental

films by young directors which don't make any money.

These experimental films, on the one hand,

they can be presented abroad in international film festivals --

films of high artistic value -- and they can win great acclaim

and recognition for the studio.

At the same time, they also exert a tremendous influence in

pushing forward the equality and form of other films produced by

the studio.

So in China, young directors don't have to worry about losing

their jobs.

If, in the US, a young director makes two or three films that

don't make any money, I think this director would lose his or

her job.

[chuckles]

[inaudible chatter]

♪Eastern music♪

-[woman VO] Outside this journey is that of hit and

miss.

In context subtleties are felt without being quite understood,

but important truths do intermittently burst forth

without warning, because it's as easy to confide in foreigners

whose shorts guarantees their discretion.

Their being outsiders makes them,

at times, strangely harmless.

-[woman VO] Think also of those of us here who don't speak all

the Chinese languages.

We are bound at some stage to hear through the translator's

ears and to speak through their mouth.

Without them, we would remain deaf and dumb.

All depends on their finesse and their ability to mold our view.

The political situation is such that actual situations

necessarily require an indirect language,

so there's always more to matters than meets the eye.

Seeing through our own eyes does not guarantee any truth.

♪Eastern music♪

Only in appearance does China often have a changing face to

the world.

In fact, Mao is borrowed from traditional China,

for the time when truly 1.000 flowers blossomed and a hundred

schools contended was the 500 years before Confucianism was

established as the state philosophy in the second century

BC.

It was then, aside from Confucianism,

that Taoism, Maoism, vitalism, dialecticism,

agrarianism, and many other -isms fully flowered.

-[woman VO] This was the time when it was said,

"Nothing is softer than water, yet water is stronger than

anything else when it attacks -- the hardest and the most

resistant."

Gentleness always prevails over hardness.

♪Eastern music♪

-[woman VO] Today, coming back to Mao's persuasive speech,

one breathed with some bewilderment the following

affirmations: we think that it is as harmful to the growth of

art and science if administrative measures are used

to impose one particular style of art or school of thought and

to ban another.

-[woman VO] This is close to home.

I mean, both homes.

There are differences, but this is nothing specific to China.

-[woman VO] Don't shoot back at random.

Here's what Mao also said in that speech: Throughout history,

new and correct things have often failed at the outset to

win recognition from the majority of the people,

and have had to develop by twists and turns and struggle.

It is therefore necessary to be careful about questions of right

and wrong.

[inaudible chatter and howling]

♪Eastern music♪

-[woman VO] Man does not grind ink,

but ink grinds men.

-[woman VO] Zhuangzi once asked, "Where can I find a man who has

forgotten words, so I can talk to him?"

♪pulsing music♪

It is said that the five colors will blind a man's sight.

♪pulsing music♪

-[foreign language].

-[translator VO] As a movie director,

I personally would not wish my films to be transmitted or

released as videos 'cause, um, watching videos on a TV screen,

the quality is very, very low compared to the full effect you

get watching a film on a movie screen in a movie house.

However, at the same time, I understand that video

distribution in the United States is quite large.

I've heard that 30 to 40 percent of its profits comes from its

release as a film in a movie house,

and the rest of the profits comes from its distribution as

video.

So therefore, I might have to dispense with my other concerns.

-Well, um, the relationship between video and film is like

this: um, in China, um, films have been made increasingly into

videos, and at the same time, in recent years,

there have been fresh videos made -- just as videos,

not as films first.

♪man singing in foreign language♪

-[woman VO] On the seventh day of the seventh moon,

Ho Long chose to lie down in the sun.

When someone asked what he was doing,

he replied, "As with books, a man needs an occasional sunning

to avoid mildew."

[laughter]

To the east was the Azure Dragon and the element of wood standing

for spring and the rising sun.

In the north was the Black Tortoise,

and the element of water indicating winter.

With time and transformation, even the Little Red Book was

declared bad, since it'd been compiled by that traitor

[foreign language], who dared to criticize the son of our hearts.

Today, the son himself has been revised.

The people are left with only some odds and ends of the holy

words.

Mao was a son of the earth.

For 10 years, he lived in cave dwellings and immersed himself

in manual labor.

He cultivated many flowers and weeded out the poisonous ones.

Mao was no peasant.

Mao was a man of mind and a man of letters.

During a long March, it was said that he read most of the time.

And then, he would sit and dream solitarily.

When he immersed himself in manual labor,

it wasn't forced labor; he was cultivating his own garden,

[foreign language]

But there are further differences to be made.

One of the tales spun in the Yan'an also relates how Mao used

to be made bored by party officials.

Although he himself was always fond of delivering long

speeches, it was said that those who secretly collected his poems

relied on the days of the party's meetings,

during which Mao would write series of short four-verse poems

while the speeches went on.

Then, he would throw them away, under the table,

in crumpled paper balls.

-[woman VO] "He died at last.

Without your death, China would've gone to pieces."

-[woman VO] "How dare you."

♪man singing acappella in foreign language♪

-[man VO] [foreign language].

-[translator VO] This is a popular song on the Yellow Loess

soil in the high plateaus of Shanxi province.

As a child, I was very familiar with these folk songs,

and in my films, you can often hear them.

As a child, I grew up in a very poor area.

It is said that here, you can dig down really deep into the

Yellow Loess soil and all you'll find is just the same Loess soil

-- no rocks, no stones.

I used to live in these cave dwellings,

in the hillsides, between northern Shanxi province and the

middle plains.

You can find these underground cave dwellings.

It's called yaodong.

They have a long gateway leading downwards.

They're very warm in winter because no wind comes in,

and you also have a very hot kang,

which is an earthern raised bed underneath which you burn

firewood, and your whole body is nice and cozy.

In the summer, you feel very cool inside these dwellings.

I think if the whole world lived in such dwellings,

everyone would be very healthy.

As a child, I used to accompany adults to the hills and we used

to herd sheep.

We'd stand on the bare hillsides and yell out these folk songs,

and our echoes would just reverberate back and forth

between the hillsides.

Mixing together with the local people,

I've really developed deep feelings of attachment for them,

so whenever I see these ordinary peasants from these areas,

even though they may have dirty faces and maybe some of them may

be very selfish, I still feel very close to them,

and I still find them very endearing.

-[woman VO] "There cannot be two suns in one sky,"

Mao said, when he assumed the position of the Son of Heaven.

-[woman VO] "If I conquer the mountain,

then it is I who sits on the mountain."

Only the leaders can issue orders.

They monopolized the power to decree what is right and what is

wrong.

In every political or economic campaign launched,

the people have been relegated to minor roles forever,

supporting enthusiastically and responding to the call of the

great man.

Those who stray aside are labeled accordingly,

for the ruler's authority encompasses every aspect of

people's private lives.

-[woman VO] "When I have presented one corner of a

subject to anyone and he cannot learn the other three from it,"

said Confucius, "I do not repeat my lesson."

The sage contributed to maintain a society rebellious to the

state system -- one based on a complex kinship system of

loyalty and an intricate guild economy.

But he died a pathetic old man who felt he had thrown it away

on stony ground.

His teachings have been twisted and he was made responsible for

every aspect of China's backwardness.

-[woman VO] How could he not be made so on the women's question?

A woman is not the moon.

She must rely on herself to shine.

-[woman VO] Chinese feminists are fond of these lines,

and the sage did nothing to unfossilize Chinese society when

it comes to rebellion against gender inequality.

♪Eastern music♪

♪woman singing and playing Eastern music♪

Did you know that Empress Wu -- who reigned until the year 705

when she was 85 years old -- no woman in Chinese history had

claimed the official powers of heaven and worn upon her back

the imperial robes embroidered with the design of dragons and

heavenly clouds?

-[woman VO] A woman on the Dragon Throne.

What a miracle!

No.

A poet does not take an experience as the content of his

poem and pour it into a forum.

There is no poetry if there is no exploration of the language.

So the poet's task is not only to say something for the first

time, but also to say, for the thousand-and-first time,

in a different way, what has been said a thousand times

already.

-[woman VO] What is manifestly real to some eyes looks

strangely stiff and conventional to others.

"You don't catch the vital spirit in things in formal

likeness," said Gao Changgong of the Tang Period.

"What seems unrealistic may transmit the life force in ways

that no mastery of the visible likeness can."

♪Eastern music♪

-[woman] [foreign language].

-[foreign language].

-[translator VO] A good story must have lifelike characters --

full of life and vitality, where each individual character has a

unique personality, where the human relations constructed

around each character develops and changes.

A good story must have a moving content.

Its plot must be fresh.

It mustn't repeat what others have already done.

In other words, you don't chew over a steamed bun that somebody

else has already chewed over.

I think that art is always the discovery of the new --

something that you discover yourself,

something new in content and form.

This is what makes a good film.

Nowadays, in many films, you see the same old things done over

and over again.

You have the same old stories in new guises,

and you have the same old styles,

and the character images are traditional in the same but put

in new costumes and trotted forth.

I think human beings are very rich and very gated.

They have many aspects to them.

And these new things must be discovered anew each time.

So I think this is a way to tell a good story,

so that the audience will get much more out of it.

♪dramatic drumming♪

-[woman VO] Mao ruled for the power of rhymes and proverbs

turned into snuggly capsuled slogans.

-[woman VO] "You can't eat a steamed bun in one bite."

-[woman VO] Yes!

He was accused of formulating a system of indoctrination

designed to turned all China into one chanting kindergarten.

-[woman VO] There could be worse.

♪flute music♪

-[woman VO] A temple is said to be the landscape of the soul.

-[woman VO] Be smooth, but be a square shooter.

-[woman VO] We seem to forget that it is in and through

symbols that, consciously or unconsciously,

we live, move, and work.

-[woman VO] The writings of the master contain the solution to

all problems, the answer to all questions.

There was no situation in life that could not be settled with a

quote from the great man.

-[woman VO] "The great man."

Which great man?

♪melodic drumming♪

-[woman VO] Solemn wise words were when the wrong political

tendency surges towards us like a rising tide,

we must not feel isolation and must dare to go against the tide

and brave it through.

Mao's word were going against the tide is a Marxist-Leninist

principal.

-[woman VO] Confucius was condemned for having opposed

social change.

He was said to have had men arrested and executed for

gathering a crowd to form an association,

for spreading heretical views, and last but not least,

for confusing right and wrong.

♪dramatic music♪

-[woman VO] The mother of Yang Jian was a devoted Buddhist,

invoking the holy name of the Buddha all day long.

Then, one day, Yang Jian decided to call his mother on a pretext.

The old lady answered.

He then continued calling to her with great frequency.

The mother grew annoyed and said,

"What is this all about?

Why all this yelling for me?"

Yang Jian replied.

"Aha!

You become vexed when I call your name but three or four

times, yet the Buddha is beckoned to thousands of times a

day.

How angry he must be!"

His mother was convinced by this logic to limit her daily

chanting.

♪dramatic drumming♪

Mao used to compare revolutionaries who fought hard

to overthrow feudal power but remained skeptical vis-a-vis his

line of Socialism to the legendary [foreign language],

a dragon-lover who collected pictures and statues of dragons

with passion but was said to have fled in a panic when the

live dragon came down the road.

A peasant said it all: Politics is just beating air with air.

Confucius also knew what he did when he said,

"I saw a dragon today.

It condenses into an entity and disperses into nothing.

It rides on a clouds, appears and disappears."

♪dramatic drumming♪

-[man] The people involved in the struggle there,

as opposed to Russian perception of things.

-[woman] Mm-hm.

-[man] But that's all I could tell you.

You know, it didn't start with them,

it start with the Cubans,

and also Marx extended.

Each situation has its own social and historical dynamics,

and you have to proceed from that.

We know all the right Russian model has been...

a farce.

I always find it very amazing that people can -- thousands of

miles -- situate themselves in a country that is one-quarter the

world -- its population is massive country in terms of,

um, just its land space -- attempt to become experts on

another country, whether it's China,

the Caribbean.

For me, it's virtually impossible,

and I think the most interesting anecdote is that people don't

even know themselves.

These very experts have the world of psychiatrists,

[chuckles] um, to tell them what's happened to them.

What's the matter with them?

In that context, I think that, um,

for me, China is a place-- some place else that has an enormous

amount of people...

to carry out an organization program -- an alignment

America's wishes, which was to get freely to produce things for

the marketplace.

The problem is that China has not yet decided whether it wants

to go toward the free market or whether it wants to have a dual

economy.

And when the students and the autonomous workers came out,

it became a serious threat to the present status quo because

they do not understand that they never perceive of a situation

which their response to the modernization,

we don't know what that represents.

I don't think you-- first of all,

I don't think...

I'll agree with Mao to the extent that when the

intellectuals gather, they exchange ideas,

and ideas are never limited or narrow.

Intellectuals are involved in the whole spectrum of life --

material life.

That means from the ant to human beings.

I use the ant as a microcosm, as a small epsilon,

a small thing to a large thing.

And there's the dichotomy -- or apparent dichotomy -- between

the two.

But, um, he's correct in that intellectuals express certain

kinds of ideas, and people in power,

by definition, see intellectuals as a threat -- as a threat to

the status or the status quo.

So Mao was correct.

I would like to take it a bit further by pointing out that

intellectuals have a certain tradition;

they are the people who've been taught,

who have a certain kind of background,

and within the context of modern society,

they're the people who have been trained.

They are the privileged people, whether you like it or not.

And in society, the state has to preserve itself.

Tiananmen Square, for me, exemplify the problem of the

problem of non-organization to the extent that Mao's famous

speech, "Let a hundred blossoms...

Let a hundred flowers blossoms...

Let a...

a hundred something contend," was another way in bringing the

full felt of the closet out of the holes,

out of the various subterranean levels of society,

of Chinese society, only to wipe them out once again,

because they pose a trap.

They wanted to know what was going on,

and the Tiananmen Square situation was one in which the

Chinese, again, used -- after I suppose 50 years -- to bring the

intellectuals out so they will expose themselves,

and then move in then.

The question is, it's a very dangerous situation for China

because...

if people come and express all kinds of

views openly, and the state manipulates the manner in which

they come out, then, in my view, the state can't progress;

it can't make amends or solve certain kinds of institutional

problems.

-[woman VO] As a Chinese reporter noted,

it was inevitable that either economic reform would break

through the old political order or that the old political order

would act as a break on economic reform.

-[woman VO] And the truth about China is more often than not

full of surprises, because ruptures and continuities occur

side by side.

And, as a saying goes,

we have lifted a rock only to drop it on our own feet.

-[woman VO] [chuckles]

♪man singing acappella♪

-[woman VO] You sitting on the mule up in front of the pack,

where the three lanterns are glowing.

On the mule hangs a bell making that "wong wong" sound.

If you're my lover, please wave your hand.

If you're not my lover, please just go on.

-[woman VO] The Beijing Review made it clear.

Although China after Mao has made public the chamber's

mistakes, rectified so-called left mistakes,

and adopted a correct line, there was no one

decommodification.

-[woman VO] A thousand-year sleep,

10-day wake.

It was a short spring, but a memorable one,

for the world wept at the sight of the massacre.

Fear was the name of the wild shooting into the crowd.

They couldn't distinguish all the different forms,

so they were aiming blindly at the contents.

That night, China's hundred flowers were again trampled

ruthlessly.

-[woman VO] The cultural revolution was said to have

confounded right and wrong.

It made no distinction between the people and the enemy.

♪Eastern music♪

The hundred flowers episode had revealed

another dangerous source of opposition: the resurgent

anti-Chinese nationalism of all the minorities.

The government's propaganda attacked great Han chauvinism,

but the minorities remained by and large the barbarians.

Their liberation could only be achieved with the intervention

of the People's Liberation Army.

-[woman VO] Writing on China's subtropical home of many

nationalities, an official assigned researcher from

Northern China reported that the poverty and primitiveness of

[foreign language], apart from political causes,

has been due to inaccessibility.

Though the changes have been great,

this region is still backward compared with other parts of the

country, and the People's Government is doing much to help

bridge the gap.

-[woman VO] The same researcher also related that,

recalling the bad old days, the peasant sailed with a very deep

feeling; without the bright sunshine,

the lotus flowers could not bloom,

and without the golden bridge of Socialism,

how could we step from Hell into Heaven?

♪Eastern music♪

-[man] I jokingly refer to myself as a member of the

residual class.

It's a euphemism for living on the ground,

or living outside the norms of the status quo.

This is important for me because when I wake up in the morning,

I'm a creature of habit.

I either turn on the radio to NPR or KPFA,

and it's a very difficult task when one turns on the radio,

because you feel you're being strangled -- gradually

asphyxiated -- because of the way in which consciousness

reduced.

♪Eastern music♪

-[woman VO] These private plots are called the "tails of

Capitalism."

For a long time, we did our best to cut them off.

Why should we go back to a less socialist organization now?

-[woman VO] While at sea, Master Eye anchored for the night in

the cove of an island.

At night, he heard the sound of weeping coming from the water,

coupled with human-like voices.

Listening more carefully, he overheard this conversation: The

dragon king has issued a decree yesterday to the effect that all

aquating animals that have tails are to be beheaded.

As I am an alligator, I weep, because I am afraid of death.

-[woman VO] But thou are a frog and has no tail.

Now, why weep as thou, then?

-[woman VO] There, after he heard the plaintive reply,

"I am indeed fortunate to have no tail at present,

but the fact that I did once bear a tail as a tadpole might

be recalled."

-[foreign language].

-[woman VO] Mao said it loud and clear: "Political power goes out

of the barrel of a gun.

Only with guns can the whole world be transformed."

-[woman VO] Still, on the question of Tibet,

[foreign language] said, "One cannot comb different kinds of

hair with the same brush."

[pounding]

-[man] You ask me a question that arrises out of the sign of

Soviet and split out of China's coming out of isolation.

The interesting thing about Chinese model is that the

Chinese, first of all, is autonomous.

We work side by side with you.

The decision-making process is not left to the Chinese,

it was left to the Tanzanians, which meant that the Tanzanians

can change the program but kept the railroad going.

The railroad had significant impact on that regional economic

sphere, because it allowed Zambia to transport its good to

Tanzania that had a port, but also enhance Tanzania's

position.

The second thing they did was to introduce a health program based

on the restoration of African medicine.

What they did was integrate Western medicine,

Chinese medicine, and African medicine,

which allowed for the Africans to integrate all these various

facets with the health system.

The third and most important thing was the question of the

offense.

The Chinese decided to teach the Tanzania about guerrilla

warfare.

They modernized their military system by teaching them

guerrilla warfare because they were surrounded by hostile

nations.

Lastly, in view of the fact that they were-- they had built this

railroad -- Rhodesia didn't like it,

South Africa didn't like it, the Americans didn't like it,

the rest-- nobody liked the fact that this unfeasible thing was

becoming a dream come true -- a dream real.

The military aspect of it was fundamental to the Tanzanian

economy because they were able to engage -- if they were

engaged -- in military combat at the level that the West was not

able to confront.

In my view, because you are in your own backyard,

I know no country that engages in war that has lost their war

in modern-times-based guerrilla warfare.

So in that sense, the Chinese model was an advance of the

Soviets because the Chinese had a program in which they charged

no interest on loan/aid; it was protracted over a long period of

time and was paid.

But then, the Chinese made another attempt to get into

Africa, which was their moving into Mozambique,

Angola, Savimbi running dog.

They went along.

They supported running dog largely because the Soviets

supported imperially.

Now, one has to be placed in the context.

The sign of the Soviet split has to be seen as a crucial

departure from the old solidarity -- international

solidarity -- with the Soviets and all the anti-imperials and

the colonization movement.

And in this sense, the Chinese, um,

one can say that the Chinese decided to support Savimbi

without analyzing the role that Savimbi will do-- the

destabilizing roles Savimbi would've played in that region.

But they had to.

It was-- it could be viewed as an independent position,

but in terms of Africa, it was a very retrograde position,

in my view.

And that's why I say the question of 50-50 there -- 50

percent, um, failure and 50 percent success.

I saw China as a very positive sign until Mao's death,

and for me, that's a very realistic position.

I don't think -- except for the people who make policy decisions

-- they have to situate themselves into China,

because they affect policy.

But for the average person, China is a place that is vast

and beautiful and intriguing.

I consider myself a member of the residual class,

largely because I am in between it,

I'm not of it.

By that, I mean that people produce,

they appropriate people's labor by-- the people who appropriate

people's labor, the ruling elite,

they own the means of production,

and then there's the working class who doesn't have time to

think about who is given its labor to,

or to where it's given its debt to.

And me, who enjoy everything that both sides produce.

[quacking]

♪Eastern music♪

-[woman VO] "China is an attractive piece of meat,

coveted by all.

But this meat is very tough, and for years,

no one has been able to bite into it."

These were Zhou Enlai's words.

Is eating and drinking a mere trifle?

-[woman VO] No, class struggle exists even at the tips of one's

chopsticks.

Under the conditions of proletarian dictatorship,

the class enemy will attack us, not only with steel bullets,

but more frequently with sugar-coated bullets.

As the saying goes, "You can't lift your hand against them when

you eat your food."

This was [foreign language] writing in Red Flag, the party

journal.

♪Eastern music♪

-[woman VO] No member of the May Fourth generation was more

sensitive to the importance of words and the uses of language

in politics than Mao.

-[woman VO] His words were unconditionally worshipped.

But when words and acts no longer coincided,

articles in the People's Daily did appear with headlines such

as "Talking Nonsense" or "Great, Empty Talk."

-[woman VO] The politics of the word is,

as Mao put it, a verbal struggle.

And the struggle will never end.

But Mao's word power prevails, even when Mao is denounced in

the name of Mao.

♪Eastern music♪

When I came out of that bookstore,

the young man in Shanghai asked with excitement,

"What did you buy?"

And I said, "Oh, well, a collection of essays on China

after Mao by the Beijing Review."

The young man looked at me with utter astonishment and exclaim.

"What did you by that crap for?"

That's when I realized how good his English was.

[chuckles]

-[woman VO] [chuckling] What else do you remember of him?

-[woman VO] Well, he was a former Red guard.

One day, in the midst of a conversation,

he asked me, "Do you know how we'll come to know whether or

not we've reached?

Whether we've succeeded in the full modernizations?

When each family in Shanghai will have a toilet all of its

own."

♪Eastern music♪

-[woman VO] Now, how do we distinguish between right and

left, anyway?

Why are those who support progress and oppose

bureaucratism and conservatism labeled "rightists" while those

who oppose reforming and want to continue with the old ways are

honored as leftists?

Why the strange inversion?

This is what a Chinese journalist asked the party

official 40 years ago.

-[woman VO] Mountain and water are male and female.

If the dragon curls left, the water has to curl right.

If the dragon curls right, the water has to turn left.

The two embrace each other, and only then does a sight coalesce.

The system may be right in its operative manners,

but it situates itself on the left.

♪Eastern music♪

A woman remarked that the rise of patriarchal society probably

started when man began to accumulate personal over

communal property.

This change in secular power coincided with the rise of sun

worship under a male priesthood.

What was conceived as religious or spiritual values for the

symbol of the moon was transferred to the sun and came

under masculine control.

Sun rationale and sun cruelties hence reigned over moon thinking

and moon madness.

The sun hero was then a man who claimed to be the one and only

son of heaven.

-[woman VO] As the dragon was appropriated as a symbol of the

ruler, its use by ordinary people was considered an

encroachment on the imperial authority.

But all this issue during the Yuan dynasty to prohibit dragon

designs were ignored by the people,

to compromise imperial dragons, which have five claws,

while those used by administrators in lower ranks,

which have only three or four claws.

Later on, names were rectified, and the dragon with five claws

remained the "dragon" while the one with four claws was called a

"python."

The dragon is said to have nine sons: the dragon of burden

usually seen at the base of monuments;

the dragon of fantasy, standing on the roof with its head turned

upward toward the sky; the loudmouth dragon,

frequently found on bells; the tiger-faced dragon guarding the

entrances of jails; the food-lover dragon imprinted on

rice bowls; the river dragon adorning the parapets of

bridges; the great fighter dragon carved on the hilts of

swords; the smoke-lover dragon decorating incense burners;

and the recluse dragon, appearing on closed doors.

♪Eastern music♪

China is red, yellow, and blue, feared and hated.

She used to be identified with the red menace.

Then, she became the "golden horde,"

the "yellow peril."

And finally, she drew both contempt and admiration for her

"blue ants," as an American journalist once called her

masses of workers uniformly clad in their outfits.

-[woman VO] The story goes that Emperor [foreign language] chose

this line from a famous poem: One speck of red among 10.000

green, a candidate painted a stork in a group of pine trees,

a speck of red on its head.

A second showed the crimson sun setting over a welter of green

waves.

But the winning scene was that of a girl leaning pensively on a

balcony with a cluster of willow trees below her.

[applause]

The word "red" is assembled for a woman.

[roaring applause]

♪Eastern music♪

-[man] [foreign language].

-[translator VO] The image of the dragon was created by our

ancestors.

It is said that the image came from the idea that there were

two snakes in the sky -- that the dragon is a composite of a

horse's head, a deer's antler, a snake's body,

and the chicken's claws, so the dragon symbolizes life itself,

but to this day is a modern Chinese totem,

and the dragon symbolizes power.

For example, the emperor proclaimed himself a dragon;

he was the true dragon's son of heaven.

The Chinese also made the dragon into a kind of God.

For example, in times of draught,

the people would beg for rain and they would go to the dragon

king's temple.

And so the dragon really reflects the complicated,

deep cultural attitudes of the Chinese people.

-[foreign language].

♪Eastern music♪

-[translator VO] The dragon, in Chinese tradition,

is known as something that controls the waters.

I know of a story that goes back to about the early 20th century

from the Tonghai mountains in China.

In this story, the villagers were having trouble getting

rain, and they sent a representative to the dragon

king, to his temple, to beg for sympathy.

What they did was to attach a very sharp knives to his arms.

This method of begging for sympathy is called the "vicious

vapors."

They would also attach four small knives to his neck,

and so whenever he moved, he would cut himself.

Then, he would run at the head of the other villagers.

They would run for over 20 kilometers -- this,

in the hot summer with no water to drink -- and the knives would

just cut into his arms and his body and his neck,

and the blood would run out and they would dry up and cake and

clot up.

And then, when they got to the temple,

the whole village would kneel down,

and this man knelt there for one full day and one night.

But the dragon king showed no mercy.

No rain came down.

This man, though, died in the process.

His son then went to the plains of Hebei province,

their old hometown, to try and win this dragon king's mercy.

All the villagers knelt down in front of this one for three days

and three nights.

But it still did not work.

In despair and anger, the sun just took this dragon king's

image and hung him up from the ceiling and beat it very hard.

All of a sudden, the heavens broke loose.

The rain just came pouring down.

The dragon king was so angry that he just let loose his

control over the water, and so the people had rain.

This is a story that expresses, a great deal,

the attitudes that people have towards the dragon king.

-[man] [foreign language].

♪Eastern music♪

-[woman VO] Here's another view of Red from a party official:

"10 or 100 brainwashings are needed in the life of a man.

10 or 100 cultural revolutions are needed in the life of China,

if she is to remain Red for 1.000 or 10.000 years.

Red doesn't last well.

It fades."

-[woman VO] "Sure, everything is possible,"

as a student in [foreign language] said.

"What was bad yesterday is good today but can be bad again

tomorrow.

One day we are told to adulate and worship a man,

another we are told to vilify and curse him.

Then, we are again ordered to glue back the shattered pieces

of the same man we've damned.

In the hands of our leaders, we are mere puppets of the game of

the day."

[inaudible chatter]

♪Eastern music♪

The traditional opera retains its popularity with the masses

down to the present day.

Scholar Wang Shun compares it to the paintings of Qi Baishi,

whose depictions of grass and flowers and landscapes are in

simple vigorous strokes that leave out many details,

yet among the leaves and the petals,

we often see such tiny insects as a dragonfly or the cricket

painting in the Gongbi style, the realistic style,

with such meticulous care that even the lines of their wings

can be seen.

The performance of the traditional opera artist vary

from gross exaggeration to extreme precision,

and restrictions of time and space are removed,

giving the actors an extraordinary degree of freedom.

Bold omissions and minute depictions become a perfectly

harmonized entity in the whole performance.

As with Shen Fu's garden, the joy was to see these small in

the large and the large in the small,

the real in the illusory and the illusory in the real.

Dragon headwall -- its workmanship may be very fine,

and the head, in its own way, is splendid.

But most garden-lovers disapprove of such literal

interpretations, for their lack of ambiguity can only limit the

imagination.

-[woman VO] China was called "the mother of gardens" -- of

the countries to which Western gardens are most deeply

indebted, she holds the highest place.

-[woman VO] An inscription above one of the doorways of a garden

reads, "The fragrance of antiquity lasts forever."

Meticulous naturalist reconstructions of the landscape

by painters of the past mainstream northern school were

disregarded by southern painters whose landscapes of the heart

flowed freely with bold, powerful lines and movements,

stressing the oneness of the sensual material and spiritual

worlds, thereby reproducing not the arrested forms of nature but

its vital spirit.

Like the painter, the garden-maker creates landscapes

and is an interpreter, not a copyist.

The true way has always been to capture the [foreign language]

In a successful garden, forms themselves are only starting

points for the imagination to roam freely about.

-[man] You came from Shanghai?

-Yes.

-[man] Why did you immigrate to the United States?

-[foreign language].

♪Eastern music♪

[crickets and inaudible chatter]

♪acappella singing♪

-[woman VO] An old house is an intimate thing.

Its walls, floors, windows, and doors bear the traces of human

wear and tear.

And we eye a painting like we sip our tea,

convinced that a hasty glance can only bring a superficial

satisfaction.

We look at them until the inner significance sinks into our

minds and the imagination is fed to the full.

This is from painter [foreign language]

The incense burner sits proudly by Buddha's hand on the temple

altar, and the lowly night pot is hidden away

under the bed.

Both are made of clay, fired in one kiln.

Why, then, is one so high and the other so low?

The water will not be clear if there are too many fish in the

river.

Nothing can be accomplished if there are too many officials in

government.

-Here's another shot in the dark.

There's no movement.

Won't you have me?

Just allows head-on shot.

-Don't become infatuated with this machinery.

After all, you're only offered a guest shot on the show.

-Oh. [chuckles]

-[inaudible].

-I'm supposed to be an actress.

-[laughs]

-I think!

[chuckling] Well, tell me, what do you do outside of this show?

-Well, I think I think of myself-- I'd like to think of

myself as a political activist.

It's not quite an occupation.

I've managed to somehow make a living from it.

No, this show has been interesting because Mao is one

of my heroes.

-[woman] Really?

-Well, most people, I think, in the United States don't know

what China was like before the revolution,

before liberation.

I used to go to school in the winter stepping over dead

bodies, and it's hard to imagine a society where 98 percent of

the people are poor with hardly a way to make a living,

subject to famine, to drought.

And if you're in the city, you just have to scrounge.

Probably the worst thing is just the lack of value for human

life, the lack of dignity.

And that's something Mao -- plus the people he was able to pull

together and work with -- was able to change.

In 5.000 years of history, there's never been a time,

I think, when individual Chinese -- now over a billion of them --

at least have clothing, shelter, food,

some dignity, and that's the first time in history.

I think it's been a miraculous 50 years.

-[woman] So Mao was definitely the hope of China.

-My relatives think of him as a wonderful revolutionary,

not so good as an administrator.

And I suppose that's right.

The cultural revolution had its problems.

-[woman] What's your feeling about China now?

-[woman] Well, I think that for all the deaths,

you know, Tiananmen was horrible,

because here were television cameras watching tanks and

watching the troops come in.

People tend to think of the thousands -- I don't care how

many thousands were killed.

But you have to think about the tens of thousands,

the hundreds of thousands who were killed before the

revolution liberation.

And they didn't die the heroic deaths that people did in

Tiananmen Square, they died the deaths of misery of being a

rickshaw coolie and dying when you're 35,

because you don't have enough to pay,

you don't have enough-- you can't eat enough to get the

calories to drag a rickshaw.

The indignity of being a prostitute when you were 14 or

15, being a female in a Confucius China,

it was disgusting.

So I don't care how bad things are now today.

It's better than it was.

-[woman] We don't have a sense of the whole history of China.

-[woman] Well, it is a dragon.

All the incredible changes -- and some of them miraculous,

and very, very powerful.

-Well, I'm an American born Chinese,

and I find myself in a very fascinating position of trying

to understand China but being American.

So I have the pull one hand on dry land over here and one hand

on dry land over there.

Oh!

Our items!

-[woman] This lovely fragile box.

-And yes, my position is just as fragile,

I feel, sometimes, because with my hands spread out,

I find my feet wet.

-[woman] You're fourth generation, aren't you?

-Yes, I am.

I'm fourth generation, but both my parents were very steeped in

Chinese culture.

-How did they maintain that through three generations?

And what does it mean being Chinese?

-I'm glad when this is going to be over,

and I'm hoping I can do something with it if she doesn't

approve of what I say.

Do another thing.

Let's keep my mouth going.

-Deep silence.

-Yeah.

-[man] The media in the United States had a function to

legitimize the modernization program,

and to that extent, I say that the situation in Tiananmen

Square was multi-faceted, was much more complex.

It is clear that the materiality of the students was in question,

as well as the workers.

The workers wanted to preserve their privileges,

as in any urban society.

But the real problem is that after the media shut off their

revolution by TV, the regime moved on the people -- both the

students and the workers; we couldn't determine who was

students and who was workers.

There's a famous thing by Gil-Scott Heron,

"The revolution wouldn't be televised."

The problem is that when you kill one person,

it is justified for killing 100.000.

How long will we tolerate a situation in which the killing

of one person can be justified in relation to those views that

they do not expose in relation to the ideological wishes of the

state?

After the media projected the Tiananmen Square as something

calling democratization and freedom...

I don't think it has something to do with it.

Nobody knows.

Only the people who speak the language of China understands

that problem, what it is they were demonstrating,

protesting against.

♪Eastern music♪

-[woman VO] It's not, I love these flowers more than life.

Only when they're gone

life, too, may flee.

♪Eastern music♪