Inside Mao's China | Free Documentary History

[Applause] in 1966 mao zedong declares a cultural revolution he wants to establish a new form of communism one that is more radical and far-reaching than ever before at that time there are only a few europeans in china what is it like to experience the movement from the inside far away in europe many young people are fascinated by this movement holding up placards with mao's image they take to the streets in protest against their own governments it's often romanticized in europe and remains a taboo in china to this day what was it really like the great cultural revolution of the proletariat the residential buildings are peaking university for foreign languages paul crook is from england and grew up here nowadays he lives in london his mother stayed here paul crook visits her as often as he can the 101 year old is one of the few western foreigners who followed mao's communist movement passionately in the early days [Music] in 1937 paul's father david comes to china as a staunch communist the young couple experience at first hand the upheaval of the socialist revolution in the rural areas well of course it brings back memories of what was happening then and i'm just glad that some of it has been captured i think that's very valuable the crooks moved to peking at the end of the 1940s the university for foreign languages needs native english-speaking professors at the time my my parents were very keen uh supporters of uh the communist revolution in china they were treated with great respect and uh you know and and participated in life in the university uh and uh up until the cultural revolution mostly you know it was a very positive experience for them paul crook is also inspired by mao and his youth uh i think i must have been really quite excited about the idea of of seeing mao even in the in a distance at a sports event he was this great idol that we had in our textbooks and that people talked about uh yeah rather like i think uh teenagers or pre-teenagers worship their uh their pop idols you know mao zedong has been revered since he established the people's socialist republic of china in 1949. in the eyes of the population he created a new china following a century of shameful occupations wars and a brutal civil war he epitomized the sense of a new beginning for the first time since the days of the old empire china is standing on its own two feet again the charismatic mao is the figurehead of communism celebrated by the masses the lives of gudrun alva and her mother basilia fang from austria are closely linked to mao's china in 1951 gudrun's mother basilia emigrated to china with her daughter who was three years old at the time little godren experiences mao's propaganda from as early as her first grade at school i can remember in primary school textbooks first you learned about the communist party and mao zedong as the first words you learned before papa mama numbers and letters as a single parent in the early 1950s gudrun's mother basilia falls in love with fang bing a chinese post-graduate engineering student after their wedding he wants to help china to become more industrialized using his metallurgy expertise he convinces his wife from tyrol to accompany him to china an exotic country back then well we already knew about africa but china totally unknown it was too far away but for some reason that didn't bother me at all gudrun alba grows up with two half brothers in shanyang in northern china before long she only speaks chinese she got upset when anyone said she was foreign the worst thing for her was having blonde hair if only she had black hair then she wouldn't stand out so much [Music] i felt like i was the devil with everyone looking at me touching my hair some children were curious they had thick hair i had thin hair i had blue eyes they all had black eyes when i went out into a new part of town the whole street filled up the police had to come and stop the children so that i could get away quickly despite the mao cult and communism itself basilia tries to raise her daughter to be a catholic like herself she has brought a consecrated image with her to china as a memory of her home in toronto have a disability but the image that there is the archangel the little one you see the one with the wings right there in the picture of the office early in the morning when we woke up we often looked at the picture and talked about it yes that's the angel he protects the children so that they back then the mother and daughter could never have imagined that this guardian angel could ever bring the family into danger in china mao's ideology is penetrating deeper and deeper into the everyday lives of the people the party leader thinks that industrial development is happening too slowly he orders a great leap forward china should soon be producing more steel than great britain with the sheer willpower of the people alone even the farmers need to build small furnaces but while they are toiling away for mao's vision their fields become barrel instead of the envisioned economic boom there is famine around the beginning of the 1960s between 15 and 30 million people in china mostly living in the rural areas die of hunger the other party leaders rebel against mao's lunacy and tried to limit his power the pragmatic new head of state leo xiao qi intends to guide china out of the crisis in 1963 irina eggleben accompanies her husband walter to china a country shaken by crisis as he travels to peking as a correspondent for adn the gdr news agency the couple are among the very few foreigners still allowed to enter the country my husband could speak chinese so of course he was sent to china as a correspondent and [Music] photos document not only everyday life but also the political power struggles in the communist country feel a thousand thousands of infuriated young people block the road at a crossing the adn vehicle is stopped by maori troops surrounded and covered in leaflets of slogans settled in the mid-1960s the country is close to breaking point behind the scenes mao is forging plans for his return to power in 1966 he strikes yes i can remember on may the 16th we had to go to school in the evening and listen to the news there is a handwritten placard the so-called wall newspaper it criticizes the party leadership of peking university for being revisionist mao launches an attack on his internal political opponents saying there are bureaucrats everywhere who want capitalism back the people ought to display placards and expose these class enemies and their bourgeois thinking then some classmates started putting up posters in classrooms and in the hallways in the primary school criticizing various aspects of the teaching irena atlaben takes photographs of the placards writing a wall newspaper now means showing loyalty to the old leader mao who is still celebrated amongst the people the insults mostly against leo xiao qi the head of state are growing wilder and wilder they were put up everywhere it didn't matter where whether at the watchmakers at the big department store or at the beautiful peking super hotel they were put up everywhere and if you were unlucky they put them on your back also takes photographs of how the red guards are now forming newly mobilized youth groups as part of the cultural revolution adolescents are no longer supposed to merely sit dutifully in the classroom but rather to march for the chairman as part of the mao youth under his authority they are supposed to rescue socialism in china from its bourgeois enemies within the party an honorable task and many people from our class had to wear these red armbands yeah and then they made lists of those who belong to a good family farmers family workers so much how about uh those got the art straight away but gordon's chinese stepfather is an intellectual so she's not included then i went home and spoke with my mother and asked her what my grandma and tyrol did for a living she said she was a farmer [Music] next target the next day i went to the office of the immigration police and said i want to have it formally confirmed that my grandma is a farmer which they did immediately yes okay you come from a farming family and that's how gudrun alba becomes the only austrian red guard a young soldier for mao just like millions of other young people she wields the little red book carrying the words of the chairman very proud of course they had to go straight to the photographer and we took photos i came home and my father said how did you get that i told him father said yes you are very intelligent that's a good thing that protects our family mao sends his red guards into a war of symbols he considers china's traditions and culture to be anti-socialist and seeks to destroy them it's an adventure for young people they get to storm temples and palaces destroying and defacing the old images in june 1966 mao even closes the schools and universities the cultural revolution becomes a kind of exciting mission for young people [Music] back then i was not quite 18 i think and it felt like freedom we were all free we could run around all over the place and criticize we went out a lot because it was summer we went swimming that's all so for me it felt like a period of liberation in autumn 1966 mar receives his red guards eight times for enormous parades in peking maul calls on young people to rise up against the alleged capitalist elite and their cultural symbols above all against his political opponent liu xiaoji members of the european left wing are also fascinated by the propaganda images from china and the slogans depicting a vibrant secure socialism that isn't stifled by bureaucracy that's why what at first looked like paradise on earth wasn't really it was in fact a constant struggle for example i was studying in vienna then and we would never have dreamed of having any kind of allegiance with soviet communism presbyter is right next door just 60 kilometers from vienna right of course we were all there we knew the state of affairs in prague and so forth it was really a nightmare none of us wanted that though today carl peter schwartz is the eastern european correspondent for the frankfurter alga miner newspaper in 1970 he joined a maui's group at vienna university these are sad skills the phrase rebellion is justified wherever it occurs spoke to us so powerfully back then rebellion in itself is justified and the essence of the revolutionaries and for us the cultural revolution was just that back then reinhardt beautycover the former chairman of the green party was also interested in maoist ideas the focus wasn't so much on a theoretical system and at the beginning it wasn't even about a larger understanding but rather it was the idea that surely a utopia should be possible somewhere in protest against u.s involvement in the vietnam war many students become more and more sympathetic to leftist causes in western europe mao becomes an icon of youth uprising and resistance to imperialism armed with sentiments from the mao bible they passionately reject the dusty old elites of the war generation and dream of a more just world being a revolutionary an admirable concept in itself is that one must to a certain extent overcome a sense of separation between one's head and one's hands so it's not the case that some people just sit in an office and the others only have to carry out the tasks leftism grows especially popular in france some young people devote themselves entirely to the maoist revolution my life changed fundamentally when i became a maoist i started to see the future completely differently i went to work in a factory was visiting a maoist group in the small industrial town of saint xiaomi she's showing her daughter isabel this major landmark in her radical political past for the first time we wanted to get to the workers and encourage them to start a revolution a revolution from the employment in a textile factory and tries to inspire the other workers to rise up the inspiration comes from we couldn't china anything better than going to china ourselves and seeing what was happening we wanted to get involved over there and apply that experience in france because we were fighting for a revolution in france and we thought it would come but getting a visa for china is impossible the country is virtually sealed off apart from the stream of propaganda leaving it so china became a kind of projection screen of our revolutionary hopes it had something very religious about it religious in the sense that we needed to go to make that pilgrimage yet we didn't know exactly what it would look like when we in china the cultural revolution is advancing instead of going to lessons the young people are out in the service of mao the red guards harass their supposed enemies evermore a cleansing campaign begins in schools and universities against tutors and intellectuals and when i came back to beijing my brother said you'll never know they caught a spy in the university can you imagine who [Music] and um and i said oh could it be this could it be that you know uh there's a suspicious you know hugo slav there's um whoever uh but then they said no it's your dad as an english professor of the university for foreign languages paul's father david becomes one of the red guards first targets i couldn't believe it so so you know and they say oh there it must be a mistake you know obviously but anyway that's the reality he's not at home although paul's father is locked up in a high security prison paul's mother isabel does not lose faith in mao's vision we were worried we were concerned but also we are you know we were told we have to have faith in the party and faith in the masses as mao put it mao is now also enlisting young people and workers whose parents are not of the proletariat to fight for him various different groups are fighting for dominance everybody wants to prove that they are fighting for mao more radically than the next [Applause] if you're the object of struggle you have to show humility and the guards ensure that you showed as much as possible people who are considered to be class enemies are being exposed everywhere the objects of the struggle were lined up on the stage with heavy bricks holding his head down and contorted bodies with the hands stretched behind the back and then to say i am a monster yes indeed i tried to subvert chairman mao's revolutionary line suspects are confronted with their supposed crimes in huge gatherings people were were very fervently shouting slogans and condemning them and uh and i felt very much that i must try and participate in this but uh at the same time i had a contradictory feeling of this is a cruel thing that's that was happening thirteen-year-old paul begins to lose faith while his father sits in prison i think at that time the parameters of what was shocking and terrible were probably was probably you know we were stretched to a point you know that uh that that you use well every it's happening everywhere maybe it's normal alleged counter-revolutionaries operated openly on trucks on the roads leading to the public gatherings irena eckley is still taking pictures her photos are some of the few pieces of evidence we have of this practice in the middle is a woman with a giant like a magician's hat in the german and european fairy tales like radical members of the red guard travel from the capital to all parts of china including shenyang in northern china [Music] nothing but 15 and 16 year olds young children all how can you fight against people like that there's one wielding a bicycle chain a young girl around 14 years old going the red guard is still hunting down symbols of the old society they destroy anything that falls into their hands alba fears that her comrade's anger could be turned against her mother's guardian angel picture she thought about it at first wanting to hide it in the cellar downstairs i said please don't do that they might come they might search everywhere gordon and her brothers convinced their mother to give up the picture [Music] the lambs showed then they tore it down and burned it i'm not sure exactly the horse well boosted with a bit of hay grass to set fire to it now only one worshiped idol is left in goodwill's family then we just hung a lot of mao photos in the same place in one room all four walls were covered in mao photos the red guards rage is now out of control anyone who falls into their hands is locked up in makeshift cells and sheds the terror increasingly intrudes into paul crook's life into king after already having captured his father they now target his mother uh well she was uh you know asked to attend uh what if you could call interrogation sessions you know sessions to help clarify the truth uh about my father but about what she was doing the interrogations are endless in the end isabel crook is no longer allowed to go home at night anymore she didn't think she would stay very long but the next day they came and asked for her toothbrush and then they came for a few more things and eventually she we recognized that she was not coming home anytime soon the cultural revolution brings the country to a standstill there is widespread chaos and terror at the end of 1968 mao applies the emergency break he orders the red guards to leave the cities and head to the country to work there around 20 million young people set off ecstatically it's explained to them that they will learn from the farmer's revolutionary spirit [Music] this is the time when dieter and ann katrine becker come to china as new correspondents for the gdr as children of the german state of workers and farmers they have a positive perspective on china and its revolutionary leader my labeling is decent my favorite is this porcelain badge a young mao at the time he hadn't committed any major peaking is the first foreign posting for the beckers mao had largely sealed china off even to the other socialist countries the media coverage of china and the gdr hardly covers the extreme aspects of the cultural revolution at all yes if you look closely here was a country that had made tremendous progress in the 50s and i had always been really quite interested in china then of course wonderful things had been written about china in the gdr and i was really fascinated by it i mean not and that is a shame understood me yet the back has experienced the start of a new period in china after years of isolation mao ironically turns towards the west of all places in january 1972 american president richard nixon arrives in peking it's a political sensation it was quite an opening diplomatic relations with the federal republic of germany were also starting to take shape and china was becoming more open to the world it was previously quite cut off of course by meeting with nixon the now 78 year old mao was initiating a careful opening up of his country now even mao supporters in the west could hope to travel to china themselves [Music] this cop there was a german chinese friendship society that offered the chance to travel to china and so i said i'd like to go too when we heard the news that a group of us women might be able to travel to china and see the liberation of women there well it was an absolute adventure [Music] but daniel palo now has a young daughter isabel who is only three months old [Music] i had to decide whether to stay with my daughter and continue to breastfeed her or to travel to china but i was a maoist after all and adventure was calling it was hard but i left my daughter behind with her father and traveled to china [Music] from the summer of 1971 onwards our supporters from europe are the first to get a visa to enter the people's republic for socialist friendship visits and then you arrive so late at night into peking airport and i remember a giant white male statue looming there mao started yes all lit up and so on and it was like the entrance to paradise yes so you arrive and now you're looking at this huge country western visitors are greeted by large propagandists and signs depicting the achievements of the cultural revolution and then they started to guide us around we were brought into the great hall of the people an unbelievable privilege that was our arrival in china we sang the international our fists lifted we were moved to tears it was very emotional we were groupies in china [Music] an absolute joy felicity daniel palu has a 16 millimeter camera in her back to film for her comrades at home [Music] the people's communes and the farmers at work the great building projects the factories we'd never seen anything like it boundaries where the sparks were flying and the speeches that went along with them over land peaking across country stopovers were all the same at the schools one small chubby-faced revolutionary from the red guards came out to tell us a wild tale about the headmaster and we enjoyed all these things enormously now so the message went we have mao to thank for the fact that everything is more productive than ever before i remember a conversation with professors and students afterwards a student came up to me and said he had to explain it again he said the professors were still a little conservative so to but as students they would really want to change everything much more radically and you had the impression that you were welcomed as a sympathetic observer of a great social experiment very common guys [Music] well the fact that they came to visit i think reinforced our general faith that china was a place of world pilgrimage but on the other hand uh if the you talk to these uh for uh foreign and the believers who had come to admire the uh cradle of the chinese revolution or wherever it was that you met them then you had a sort of a you know a suspicion of wait you felt they were rather innocent the visitors journeys are planned meticulously to prevent them from going out and exploring on their own of course we didn't see the horror we didn't see how people were punished flogged and it was like a journey through the peaking review complete with illustrations and you saw these pictures and we trawled through the images and we found it to be exactly as we had imagined i mean we didn't want to see it any differently we wanted to get confirmation that it was good [Music] i came back with a feeling of well if the chinese are managing to do that we can do it too daniel palu stays in the country with her women's group for almost two months they spend a week in shanghai daniel palo wants to film the everyday lives of people in revolutionary china for her comrades in europe the chinese tour guides have selected a suitable flats we went to a market there in the middle of the hustle and bustle of people there were live fish in bags vegetables meat and poultry but she left one of her exposed films at the market the next morning she went back to look for it [Music] as we arrived back at the market everything had gone there wasn't anybody there it was completely empty you couldn't even buy this is the reality of our state the chaos and failings of the cultural revolution have driven china to the brink of ruin people have to queue up for hours even for their basic essentials and millions of so-called class enemies are still sitting in dungeons including paul crook's parents in peking in the early 70s he and his brothers have to struggle along on their own sometimes an adventure presents itself i've climbed up there before up to the second level the pagoda is quite wide so it was during the cultural revolution nobody was concerned they were all out starting a revolution so you were just wandering around there and playing about yes it was fun nowadays nobody believes us until they see a photograph of it then they do [Music] although paul's parents have been in prison for years now they have never lost their faith in mao i think my father during his time in prison was in this state of mind where he believed that you know mao was uh was either misled or didn't know about um what was going going on and if he did then surely things were put right paul crook and his brothers didn't know exactly where their parents were held at the time then one day i was cycling to my german class at picking university with my uh with my teacher and i looked up and uh at that window up there on the second window on the third level there was my mother waving at me behind bars so i waved back but then i thought i can't keep my german teacher waiting and i continued on and i was able to say to my teacher uh ichat miner and uh i was quite proud of myself but i felt obligation to be not to skip a lesson after the first shock the brothers later managed to secretly sneak into their mother's cell and speak to her she was locked up under supervision with a couple of young teachers uh constantly in the same room with her in case maybe she thinks they were worried she might kill herself or do some other harm so supervised very closely the lives of paul crook and his parents hang in the balance as is the case for millions of chinese people [Music] countless people are locked away many of paul's peers are still in the countryside or working in factories most universities are still closed for me living in china was very hard wherever i went everybody looked at me and i had no freedom none at all and then i told my parents i wanted to go to austria but gudrum is stateless she doesn't have a passport she is sent to work in a textile factory and is not allowed to leave china life is unpredictable and in in my father's case he was respected foreign friend one day and next day he had been arrested but then he came out and then he was exonerated he eventually spent uh five years in prison [Music] in solitary confinement we didn't even get to visit him for the first three or four years paul's mother is not freed either until the beginning of the 1970s only then is the family reunited despite their political persecution paul's parents don't want to leave communist china for my parents you know they were they were revolutionaries for a world revolution you know so they happen to be in china but they would certainly have wanted us to carry on the great ideal wherever we were and that was not a you know they didn't feel that we had to stay in china i wanted to go and see the world for myself and for me i think i wanted not to have to behave according to other you know uh strict guidelines and i believed i would be a lot freer if i went to the west paul says goodbye to his family at the station in peking before before i left my father said to me in the west there are so many criminals beggars if it doesn't work out and chinese newspapers also report terrible conditions in europe capitalism is right on the edge of collapse spoke to my mother and she said i came from austria i never saw those beggars this happened you saw philippe like you say it's just propaganda don't listen to it gordon is filled with doubt and says goodbye to her family as she sets out on her long journey to austria it was around 11 days by train russians just like the way the chinese looked at me in february 1972 gudrun alba arrives in vienna the city celebrates her homecoming from the eastern bloc as a welcome gift she receives a camera [Music] paul crook leaves china for the south i crossed the border from guangzhou by train to hong kong [Music] the world was such an exciting place so so i i spent 10 days going to late night cinemas uh where uh which i discovered were showing all kinds of uh western you know hollywood or whatever films that i've never seen that much like when i was young everything was new everything was different and i felt free nobody looked at me i looked just like the others with the underhouse on arriving in vienna godren alva soon meets a young student who catches her attention there was a spark he was good-looking my heart was pounding european country and then america south america and i kept saying no no every country and finally he said hong kong and then i said really really close then when she said she came from china it was [Music] and she comes from china now she can surely tell me a lot about the system and it'll confirm what i have in my head already so to speak at this point sebastian alba is a staunch maui student go there you'll be locked up by the second day only after sebastian alba renounces maoism do he and gudrun get married [Music] mao dies in 1976. the masses gather for one last time for the great leader with this the nightmare of the cultural revolution also comes to an end millions were politically persecuted mao's rival liu xiao qi died in prison up to 1.5 million people in total lost their lives today the legacy of the cultural revolution still weighs heavily on china maoists and the west also had to relinquish their idea of a chinese utopia as a leading green party politician reinhardt beauticover turned to real politique [Music] much of i worked out that it took me just about as long to free myself from this rubbish as it had been while i was in it i was in it for four years and it took me around four years to stabilize myself somewhat to find myself again so all in all this red decade was a real loss it gave me nothing for the first time in decades daniel palo is looking at the journals of her trip to china in 1971 of crucial importance of the ones about the fake market in shanghai i feel disheartened i don't want to work on this film anymore i've completely given up i don't understand anything anymore [Music] it must be the same as it is for a child who learns that father christmas isn't real you believe in father christmas and then just like that he's not real [Music] that was the shock for me at that very moment in shanghai that there was no hope of finding the perfect society that there was nothing that we could take back to france in china the communist party from back then is still in power paul's family are no longer persecuted paul has accepted an invitation to go to the province and represent his mother [Music] [Applause] now [Music] [Applause] [Applause] kind of a kafka-esque uh experience if it's too much to take to to absorb it as horror you mitigate it by a sense of the the the incredibly unbelievable uh call it comedy call it satire call it whatever you know um and it's one way of dealing with it and i think that's uh one way that i was dealing with it was to to to to to mitigate it with a sideways look at reality today daniel palo is living in paris she has never given up on the search for ways to create a better world most recently she has been inspired by the alternative new dubu movement young french people who gather every evening at the plaza de la republique and discuss globalization and social justice it was really interesting because it reminded me of the early days of the 1968 movement these are people who live in the modern world and question the system [Music] she has given up her illusions they are completely different it's [Music] society and make it more humane who do you mean [Music] you

Channel: Free Documentary - History

Views: 115,211

Keywords: Free Documentary, Documentaries, Full Documentary, documentary - topic, documentary (tv genre), History, History Documentaries, Free Documentary History, Inside Mao's China, Mao Zedong, Mao, Communist China, People's Republic of China, Cultural Revolution, Gang of Four, Great Leap Forward, Communism, History of China, Xi Jinping, Communist Party, Communist Party of China, Communist, Socialism, Trade War with China, China US Relations, Cold War, Red Bible, Chairman Mao

Id: Ig7NZ3a-azQ

Length: 52min 21sec (3141 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 16 2021