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Documentary, BBC Two -The Story of China 6 The Age of Revolution - 影片
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00:00MUSIC
00:04The story of modern China begins here in Canton, in the south.
00:11In the 1830s, China was still the greatest state on Earth,
00:15but the Europeans were growing in influence.
00:22In Canton, the new ideas of the West
00:25were mingling with the culture of old China.
00:30Traders selling opium, missionaries preaching Christ.
00:37At this time, a chance meeting took place
00:39between an American missionary
00:41and a Chinese student whose name was Hong.
00:47This, in the 1830s, was the dividing line
00:49between the European Quarter
00:51and the old Chinese city of Canton.
00:54And here Hong meets the American missionary,
00:57the Reverend Edwin Stevens, Yale-educated,
01:01wearing Chinese clothes, long-sleeved coat, his hair in a bun,
01:04and he's handing out Christian pamphlets illegally.
01:10And he stops Hong and he says to him,
01:12Follow the Christian God and you will reach the highest glory.
01:17And he gives him one of the pamphlets.
01:19And in it, Hong sees the story of Noah and the flood.
01:25And he reads his own name.
01:27Hong, literally, the flood.
01:31God's instrument to punish humanity
01:34for failing to follow the path of righteousness.
01:41Believing himself to be God's Chinese son,
01:44Hong set out to overthrow the Qing Empire,
01:48unleashing the first of three huge upheavals
01:51out of which modern China would emerge.
02:21In 1841, here in the Pearl River,
02:32the British blasted the Chinese to defeat
02:35in the First Opium War.
02:43The Chinese coastal forts were useless.
02:46Their junks no match for ironclads and rocket launchers.
02:59The British forced the Chinese to give them trading concessions,
03:02treaty ports like Canton and Shanghai.
03:09And here they began to build European-style villas,
03:13warehouses and churches.
03:17So the Qing government gave way to the British brand
03:21of international politics.
03:24And as you can see,
03:25the British started to make themselves at home.
03:38In the strange, unsettling aftermath of the Opium War,
03:41the student Hong headed to the hills.
03:44He became a village teacher out in the wild countryside of the south.
03:53And here the Bible texts began to work on his mind.
03:57Especially the prophet Isaiah.
04:00Your country is desolate.
04:02Strangers are devouring your land before your eyes.
04:07Why be downtrodden any more?
04:10Rise up and revolt.
04:12The Taiping rebellion began deep in the mountains, beyond Guiping.
04:22Very isolated places that, in the 19th century,
04:25were only joined by walking tracks.
04:27Really out of the way.
04:30Here was fertile ground for revolution.
04:37Since the 1600s, China's population had nearly trebled.
04:42A stagnating economy brought mass poverty and unemployment.
04:47The rulers were oppressive.
04:49And Hong's preaching on social justice found a willing audience.
04:55Maybe go and have a look at the place where Hong stayed.
04:58Before the rising.
04:59Yeah.
05:00Yeah.
05:01Look at this.
05:02Fantastic.
05:03Isn't that wonderful?
05:04So this was a family house, was it, once upon a time?
05:08He lived here before.
05:10That's right.
05:11That's right, it's a place that was a family house.
05:13Yes.
05:14It was used to place here.
05:16Yes, it was used to people staying in here.
05:18So it's so many people who are living here.
05:22There were also people who lived here.
05:23There were also many people who died in the city of the Greek.
05:25They would have had the people who went to the prison.
05:28They would teach students.
05:30And then the Lord, after killing them, now that they would send to the Lord.
05:34And then the Lord, the Lord would send to the Lord.
05:37Hong and his disciples started to organise village meetings.
05:49Here in Old Wood Village, they enthused the local people with their revolutionary ideas.
06:00Hong and his close friend Feng were educated men, and with their traditional respect for
06:06learning the illiterate villagers listened.
06:11Ah, ah, hello.
06:15So we've come to look for the Taiping.
06:36Hong had identified the Christian god with the high god of ancient China, and he wanted
06:43to create heaven's kingdom on earth by overthrowing the corrupt Qing empire, to make a golden age
06:48when society lived in harmony, when justice was for the poor too.
06:53For families like the Zengs, it was a powerful message.
06:57We get kind of mesmerised by the religious background to the Taiping.
07:01It was a powerful message.
07:03We get kind of mesmerised by the religious background to the Taiping,
07:07and it was a powerful message.
07:09For families like the Zengs, it was a powerful message.
07:13We get kind of mesmerised by the religious background to the Taiping, and it is incredible,
07:19isn't it?
07:20God's Chinese son.
07:21But you mustn't forget, it's a great peasant uprising.
07:26This is the poor rural agrarian workforce who are rising up against their traditional enemies,
07:33the landlords and the rich.
07:39Through the 1840s, the movement grew, and they gathered thousands of followers.
07:45The Qing government ordered troops to put them down, but in such out-of-the-way places,
07:50it was too late.
07:54They created revolutionary cells in hundreds of villages.
07:59This is Rushing Water Village.
08:01Hong's right-hand man Feng stayed here till the eve of the uprising.
08:12This is the site of the school where Feng taught and spread the Taiping ideology.
08:17You could say, this is where the great rebellion started.
08:27The school was on this site then, is that right?
08:29The school started here.
08:30And then look somewhere there, and then they're not there.
08:33Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.
08:35Back then, today's Zheng family remember, their ancestors were illiterate.
08:40That's why they first brought Feng in to teach them.
08:43It's hard to imagine, isn't it?
08:44Such earth-shaking historical events.
08:44It's hard to imagine, isn't it?
08:46Such earth-shaking historical events, beginning in such out-of-the-way places.
08:48It's hard to imagine, isn't it?
08:49Such earth-shaking historical events, beginning in such out-of-the-way places.
08:54But by 1849, these little villages under Thistle Mountain were just
08:58humming with omens and visions and prophecies.
09:03But by 1849, these little villages under Thistle Mountain were just
09:06humming with omens and visions and prophecies.
09:10Jesus was making regular descents down to earth to bring Hong messages from heaven in his dreams.
09:21Angels in golden robes were giving succor to the Taiping teachers, and God himself, in his great black dragon robe with his golden beard, was
09:42showing Hong in his trances the demon armies which he must overcome.
09:59Then in spring 1850, Hong put on the yellow robe of the empire and gave the command for all the Taiping worshippers of God to gather together.
10:12and descend into the plain.
10:14The revolution was about to begin.
10:20Soon, Hong had an army of 100,000 men, and they defeated the Qing forces in the south.
10:26The tale is told by the traditional storytellers.
10:30This is a tale of vivek and the ancient family...
10:32...
10:34...
10:36...
10:38...
10:40...
10:42...
10:44It's like this, everyone.
10:46It's in the middle of four cities.
10:48It's in the Middle East.
10:53It's in the Middle East.
10:56The leader of Hong Xiuquan is in the Middle East.
10:59It's in the Middle East.
11:05On March the 19th, 1853, Nanjing fell,
11:09and Hong was enthroned as ruler of God's heavenly kingdom.
11:13In his New Jerusalem.
11:18So the Taiping had gained power, but what would they do with it?
11:22It's a question faced by all China's revolutionaries.
11:28There's the throne of the heavenly king.
11:31Once God's kingdom here on earth had been established in Nanjing,
11:36a blizzard of ideological pronouncements came pouring from this throne.
11:42They had printing presses here.
11:44They had a whole workshop for woodblock cutting for their publications,
11:49their translations of the Old and New Testament.
11:51They banned opium, tobacco, alcohol, foot binding, prostitution, gambling.
11:58They separated the sexes.
12:00There was the death penalty for sex between men.
12:03Most important of all, China was to be classless.
12:08Private ownership of property, private ownership of land were abolished.
12:13All land would be owned by the state and distributed by the state.
12:17And this would be accompanied by a purging of the language of its foreign elements,
12:23which had been brought in by the alien Manchu conquerors.
12:27A new world of words for a new time.
12:31The Taiping state spread its power across the rich heartland of the south,
12:42and here in Nanjing the people got used to a new kind of fundamentalist rule,
12:47with new laws condemning old pleasures.
12:50In the back streets, you can still find traces of the Taiping's 16-year rule.
13:05This was the house of one of their leaders.
13:07This house belonged to the Lee family before the Taiping rebels took over the city.
13:20They fled into the countryside,
13:22and a leading Taiping prince took this over as his own residence.
13:28And he has the house painted with Taiping-themed murals.
13:35No representation of the human form.
13:38They were iconoclasts.
13:39They destroyed images and human representations of Taoist temples,
13:44Buddhist and Confucian shrines, wherever they'd gone.
13:47So the images from nature of birds, horses, landscapes.
13:51Over there, the five-storey wooden watchtower
13:56of the kind that the Taiping armies constructed.
14:00And in one of the inner halls,
14:02the Taiping prince had had the Chinese symbol for long life painted on the wall.
14:11But long life the Taiping leaders would not achieve.
14:21So China now had rival dynasties,
14:23the Qing in the north in Beijing and the Taiping in the south.
14:27But for the British and the other foreigners,
14:30their stake in China was too big to jeopardize.
14:33So they lent the Chinese government advisers
14:36and the latest weaponry to help crush the rebels.
14:41Eventually, the Qing massed a million men against them.
14:44And in 1864, nearly 16 years after they left Thistle Mountain,
14:49the Taiping were forced back behind the walls of Nanjing.
15:01Soon the rebels inside the city were decimated by disease and starvation.
15:05Then Hong himself fell ill and died.
15:08.
15:12.
15:14It was a great time for the first time,
15:17and the last time it was a war.
15:21The war was a war.
15:24It was a war that it was not the war.
15:27It was a war, and it was the war.
15:30It was the war that it was the war.
15:33It was the war.
15:44By the end, over 20 million people had died of famine, disease and fighting.
15:52The Qing thought they had weathered the storm.
15:56The war-shattered city of Nanjing was rebuilt.
16:00And at that point, the Qing could still see themselves as the centre of the world.
16:06But the Taiping Rebellion was a dire warning.
16:09Just before he was executed, one of the Taiping leaders gave this advice to the Chinese government.
16:20Buy from the foreigners their very best cannon.
16:24And get the very best Chinese craftsmen to replicate them exactly.
16:31And get them to teach other craftsmen, so the one will teach ten and the ten will teach a hundred.
16:37Until all China knows how to make them.
16:41Because if you will fight the foreign devils, you will need the best cannon.
16:47And to be very well prepared.
16:50For a war with the foreigners will certainly take place.
16:54Towards the end of the Taiping, in a second opium war, the British and the French had forced more concessions from the Chinese.
17:10More treaty ports.
17:11Eventually, over 80 of them.
17:13With their banks and villas, parts of Chinese cities began to look like corners of Europe now.
17:26And the infrastructure came with them, the telegraph and banking, railways and trams.
17:33Swelled by merchants fleeing the Taiping, Shanghai was launched on its path to become the world's greatest city.
17:40Behind me, the old headquarters of the HSBC, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation.
17:51Today, one of the richest banks in the world, but founded here in China by a British trader in 1865.
17:57So China had begun to open up, but in that lay a profound threat to the way China had seen the world for so long.
18:11Remember, this is very striking in Asia, right?
18:14The architecture, it's almost like inserting a completely alien structure or civilization on the Asian territory.
18:23So it has a remarkable impact, in that sense, on people's psyche.
18:31But in the countryside, it was a very different story.
18:38It is important to emphasize.
18:40Actually, the vast parts of China is not Shanghai.
18:44This is the part of China that's the dominant part of China.
18:47That is very important, explaining the rise of political forces.
18:50China is not the right of the face.
18:52Sparked by drought and famine, more peasant risings were flaring across the land.
18:58And then, in 1895...
19:01China was humiliated in a disastrous war with Japan.
19:08And now the colonial powers gathered like vultures.
19:13The Russians, Japanese and Germans in the north.
19:16The French and British in the south.
19:18And in 1899 came the second great explosion, the Boxer Rising.
19:28The Boxer swept on Beijing with a strange mix of martial arts and mysticism,
19:33calling for the killing of foreigners and the wiping out of foreign influence.
19:39The court fled the capital, and in the European Quarter in Beijing,
19:43the colonials were trapped in a 55-day siege.
19:49A relief army of 20,000 men drawn from the eight foreign powers marched from the coast.
20:03And they took revenge in a rampage of looting and killing.
20:07The Boxers were crushed mercilessly, and huge financial reparations imposed on China.
20:22The Boxer Rebellion was a horrendous disaster for China and for the people of Beijing,
20:30who'd never seen looting and massacres and killings like this for centuries.
20:35To make matters worse, the foreigners also demanded that this area of Beijing,
20:41the Legation Quarter, should be turned over to them.
20:44They would wall it and administer it themselves.
20:48This was the French Post Office here, built in 1901.
20:59In central Beijing, you can still trace the European Quarter on the ground.
21:05If you look at the map of Beijing, you can see what that meant in practice.
21:13This is the Legation Quarter here.
21:15It's like a mile long, nearly half a mile wide.
21:18As big as the Forbidden City.
21:21It's incredible, isn't it?
21:22And right next to it.
21:26It is another Forbidden City.
21:28The Chinese aren't allowed in it.
21:32No wonder Chinese people were outraged.
21:36The indemnity imposed on the Qing government was the equivalent today of $60 billion.
21:58What the Chinese people felt about it all can be seen through an incredible source.
22:02The 200-volume diary of an ordinary man in a small town.
22:08His name, Liu Daupeng.
22:12Today, back at his old home, his family, friends and neighbours have gathered to celebrate an unlikely local hero.
22:23A Chinese everyman who gave voice to the feelings of the people.
22:27from a Chinese people.
22:32He led to his 5th presentation in Chinese society to the instructions on his life and praise to the people.
22:41A provincial degree holder who never held office, a teacher, farmer and mine manager, Liu was loyal to the emperor and a pillar of the traditional Confucian culture.
22:52Liu was loyal to the emperor and a pillar of the traditional Confucian morality.
23:00Not the sort to support fanatics, but as his writings show,
23:04he understood the root causes of the boxer rising.
23:08And for Liu and his neighbours, the very existence of the empire was now at stake.
23:33He wrote in his diary,
23:34I fear that revolts will break out all over the provinces of the empire.
23:38When the people have no security, they will rise up.
23:42It's natural and inevitable.
23:45But where will it end?
23:50Revolution was in the air.
23:55And among women, too.
23:57Now recast as a kung fu heroine, the feminist poet Chu Jin joined the Republican movement in exile
24:08and founded a radical journal for women's voices.
24:12Brilliant and courageous, she was the tragic star of the failed revolution of 1907.
24:1815th of July 1907, four days before the planned armed uprising that would overthrow the dynasty.
24:26Chu Jin was executed by beheading here in the middle of her hometown Shaoxing.
24:33That monument marks the spot.
24:34She was 31, and at that moment, the empire itself entered its death throes.
24:37She was 31, and at that moment, the empire itself entered its death throes.
24:42She was 31, and at that moment, the empire itself entered its death throes.
25:03The next year, 1908, a two-year-old boy came to the dragon throne, and he was the last emperor.
25:25Caught between its Confucian past and a western future, the empire was doomed.
25:30On October the 10th, 1911, a coalition of the army, bankers and the urban bourgeoisie declared China a republic.
25:49In early 1912, the boy emperor was forced to abdicate.
25:53It was 2,000 years since the first emperor, 3,000 since the Zhou proclaimed the mandate of heaven,
26:08and now that vast universe of ritual and symbol was gone.
26:13But what would the Chinese people put in its place?
26:29China's first elected president was the Hawaiian-educated Sun Yat-sen, who had led the Republican movement in exile,
26:41and long dreamed of a free democratic China.
26:44their
26:53They were forced to die and był up and down.
26:54I realized that it was about Sun Yat-sen Huan.
26:59It was theisetinkenand Star-fest.
27:03So Sun Yat-sen and the World War.
27:06If Sun Yat-sen here was Rome, they were almost English.
27:08They were originally left of Meikia's Ilska.
27:12But from the start, Sun had to deal with the old powers,
27:16the army, the warlords and the foreigners.
27:20And in its brief life, the Republic never knew peace.
27:28In the First World War, China joined the Allies
27:32and provided nearly 150,000 labourers on the Western Front.
27:42But at the end of the war, they were in for a shock.
27:49When the Treaty of Versailles was signed,
27:52China's youth were shocked to find that the territory
27:55that had originally been given to Germany as a colony in the late 19th century
27:59up in Shandong Province wasn't going to be handed back to China.
28:03Instead, it would become part of a Japanese territory.
28:07And this was regarded as outrageous.
28:12On May 4th, 1919, using their newfound rights to freedom of speech,
28:18a huge student demonstration was organised in the capital.
28:22Student protest, that hot Sunday here in Beijing,
28:26has come to be seen as a powerful symbol of the Chinese people's
28:30struggle for liberation in the 20th century.
28:32There were 3,000 students and they gathered right here in front of the gates
28:40of Peking University, the old library, the red building as they called it.
28:44They had banners made out of bamboo and cloth and they wanted the world to know.
28:50They'd even prepared English language statements which they hoped to hand in
28:55to the embassies of the colonial occupying powers.
28:59The Chinese people's struggle was about to open to the world.
29:04The May 4th demonstration here in Tiananmen Square was a key moment for modern China.
29:21In a culture that gave such respect to the old, the young had spoken.
29:28And their ideas spread like wildfire.
29:37Writers and journalists now called for a wholesale renewal of Chinese society and politics.
29:44They wanted to sweep away the old and create a new culture based on Western democracy and science.
29:52A key voice was modern China's greatest writer, Lu Xun.
29:58Lu Xun was born in 1881.
30:00So by the time the May 4th movement came about, he was pushing 40,
30:04long past the idealism of youth.
30:07He was trained as a doctor and although he became a writer,
30:13through his whole life he kept that bedside manner of a world-weary,
30:19ironical but humane physician.
30:22But a pessimist, not one to let hope run away with him with all the defeats of the time.
30:28And in 1920s China, after the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles,
30:34that was the voice.
30:41This icon, the first reaction, was to press this speech when the Chinese people were going to die.
30:46He was denied the wrong people's sins.
30:48He said, ''The republic has failed us,'' he wrote.
30:50''We've been cheated. We were slaves before and now we're ruled by them.''
30:52It's not simply going to pass the truth.
30:54He said, ''The裏 despised the world. The people of France have failed us,'' he wrote.
30:59''We've been cheated. We were slaves before and now we're ruled by them.''
31:03and now we're ruled by slaves, we must renew the spirit of China.
31:33Hope is like a path in the countryside, he wrote.
31:43At first, there is no path, but if enough people walk in the same direction, the path appears.
31:57But which path would China take?
32:00The May 4th movement had electrified the political and cultural debate in China, a flood of ideas
32:09from which there would be no going back.
32:12And among those ideas was a Western political philosophy, a communist philosophy, Marxism.
32:22And the first meeting of a Chinese Communist Party was held here in this room, around this
32:28table in July 1921.
32:31There were 12 people present, among them the Hunan peasant's son, Mao Zedong.
32:38They were attracted by its anti-feudal, anti-imperialist message, and also by its claim to be scientific,
32:47that it held the key not only to history, but to the future.
32:53The 12 people sitting here were the representatives of just 57 members.
32:58At that point, the party had no significance at all.
33:13Just round the corner, the jazz age was in full swing.
33:17China's politics were in chaos, but the 20s were a dynamic time for some.
33:24The economy was growing in cities like Shanghai.
33:26A young Briton who came out here in 1919 from Lancashire after the First World War, with no
33:33jobs at home, joined the police, said, it's the best city I've ever seen, the most cosmopolitan
33:40place in the world.
33:41And in time, it will leave every English city 100 years behind.
33:51But westernisation was not just about material life, it was about China learning to be modern.
34:01These treaty and concession ports like Shanghai and Hong Kong, with their western hotels, western
34:09banks and department stores, they were pointers to the future for the new Republic of China.
34:17And adverts from the time show us that people were strongly encouraged to do what the radicals
34:22in the May the Fourth Movement and the New Culture Movement had been saying, do away with
34:27the old.
34:28From now on, let's wear western suits with a collar and tie and a fedora.
34:35So all this was a million miles away from the vast rural hinterland in which most of China's
34:42nearly 500 million people lived in the 1920s.
34:48But even there, history was on the move.
34:54In the late 20s, ravaged by floods and famines and armed conflict, peasants were selling their
35:00children, dying in their thousands of disease and starvation.
35:08And in these desperate times arose a man of destiny, Mao Zedong.
35:16Mao was born in 1893, the son of a well-off peasant in Hunan.
35:20He left high school at 25, having trained as a primary school teacher.
35:27He was haunted by childhood memories of the killing of famine-stricken protesters in his home town.
35:32And then he discovered communism.
35:35And then look at this, these are the early struggles, the early mobilisation of the peasants.
35:41His voracious reading had first led him to European socialism and then to violent revolution.
35:49He began as a guerrilla leader in a failed communist rising in his native Hunan, and then in setting
35:55up independent communist enclaves, Soviets, deep in the countryside.
36:00With that, the nationalist government, now under Prime Minister Chiang Kai-shek, decided to wipe
36:10out the communists. Thousands were killed, including Mao's wife and sister.
36:18In 1934, the survivors embarked on what became known as the Long March, a 6,000-mile trek to
36:25north-west China. Only 8,000, about a tenth of them, survived. And they made their base at Yan'an.
36:37A nowhere place in a bleak countryside, it must have seemed at that point that the communist
36:42movement in China had reached a dead end. But then, in 1937, the Japanese launched a full-scale
36:51invasion of China. The Japanese now seek total conquest, not just another chunk of territory.
37:01A century since Britain first blasted China open. A generation since the bloodshed of the
37:10boxers. Babies have grown to manhood without a year of peace. For 25 years, China has lived
37:18with warlords, guns and terror. But now it must drink deeper of the cup of bitterness.
37:26That December, in a six-week reign of terror, the Japanese army massacred more than a quarter
37:32of a million people in Nanjing.
37:37How old were you when the Japanese invaded China?
37:40I was 14 years old. I was 14 years old. I was 14 years old.
37:47And when the Japanese actually attacked the city in December 1937, what did you see? Did
37:55you hear stories from people escaping?
37:58Would you hear stories from people escaping?
38:03What did you see?
38:05The Japanese were killed.
38:06And now there were all the quarrel left.
38:07During the time, I left them behind.
38:08I left them behind. I left them behind.
38:09When I left them behind, I left them behind.
38:11My mother who was 65-year-old.
38:13I ran behind them.
38:15Then they took me behind.
38:17I jumped ahead.
38:19And a woman left.
38:21She got me behind.
38:22This was 7 people sold in Japan.
38:25When I saw her, she was arrested.
38:28After she was arrested, she couldn't get out of bed.
38:32She couldn't get out of bed and get out of bed.
38:34That's what I saw.
38:36When I got out of bed, I got out of bed.
38:39I got out of bed.
38:43Then I got out of bed.
38:46This is my first time I got out of bed.
38:55Out of such horrors, a national resistance was born.
39:01Far away in Yan'an, from a defeated guerrilla army,
39:05the communists now found themselves part of a liberation struggle.
39:10Mao himself had gained power over the party
39:13and emerged as a formidable and ruthless revolutionary.
39:21A united front was formed,
39:23with the nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek
39:26and the communists under Mao
39:28fighting the common enemy,
39:30the Japanese.
39:40The Chinese are very proud of it.
39:43It's a war of war.
39:45It's a war of war.
39:47It's a war of war.
39:49It's a war of war.
39:51It's a war of war.
39:56At that time, Mao lived here in the caves outside Yan'an.
40:00He was even visited by Western journalists.
40:08Among those who came to see him then
40:10was the philosopher and social reformer Liang Shuming.
40:14No lover of Marxism or of Western capitalism,
40:17but a Chinese patriot.
40:20Very different men.
40:22Liang, the traditional scholar in his long gown, sipping tea.
40:26And Mao, the son of a Hunan peasant,
40:28laughing, scratching himself,
40:32chain-smoking hand-rolled cigarettes
40:34and knocking back glass after glass of the local white whiskey.
40:38Marx and Confucius debating the future of China.
40:43And Liang's portrait of Mao is very attractive.
40:47He says he was relaxed and warm and natural,
40:51extremely vulgar but completely unaffected,
40:55and a very sharp mind,
40:57head and shoulders above everybody else.
41:00But for all their differences,
41:02they were agreed on the two key problems facing China.
41:06Number one, the rural question,
41:09the terrible poverty of the mass of the population of the country.
41:12And number two, national liberation from the Japanese invasion.
41:17As Mao said to Liang, the war has changed everything.
41:26This is a conflict that killed 14 million,
41:29possibly more, civilians and military in China during the war itself.
41:3414 million.
41:3514 million.
41:3680 to 100 million Chinese may well have become refugees in their own country.
41:44So in terms of changing the direction of China's politics and society,
41:49the wartime period is immensely important.
41:53When the Japanese surrendered in 1945,
41:56the National Front fell apart,
41:58and the nationalists and the communists now fought a bitter civil war.
42:03Backed by the West, and especially the US,
42:08the nationalists had the manpower and equipment.
42:11The communists were outgunned,
42:13but after 12 years in Yan'an,
42:15their land reforms had gathered mass support across the countryside,
42:19boosted by propaganda promising a golden age of social justice.
42:27In one year, the Red Army swept down the length of China,
42:30and after heavy fighting, the nationalists fled to Taiwan.
42:34The People's Republic was founded.
42:37On the 1st of October 1949, in Beijing, Mao announced the birth of a new China.
42:53There's a Tiananmen gate where Mao Zedong made that famous speech.
43:08It was only 38 years after the fall of the empire,
43:11and after all the sufferings of the Chinese people through the Japanese war,
43:15and the Second World War and the Civil War,
43:18there was widespread optimism that there might be a completely fresh new start.
43:22After all, revolution had been a fact of life in the Chinese story,
43:26almost a natural part of the recurring cycles of Chinese history.
43:31But the surprising suddenness with which, in the end,
43:36the Communists were able to take power,
43:39only added to the enormous burden that they'd inherited.
43:50Mao was above all a revolutionary.
43:53He believed that the New World could be born through destruction,
43:57and that loss of life was no object in achieving the goal of China's socialist utopia.
44:07He forged a repressive state.
44:10Words and thoughts were strictly controlled.
44:13Class war was waged.
44:17In early 1950s China, Stalin was a god.
44:22The letters above the arch say the thoughts of Chairman Mao will shine forever.
44:36This is Nanjie village in Henan,
44:39a tiny pocket of Chairman Mao's socialism in the great ocean of modern Chinese capitalism.
44:45Today, Nanjie is the last Communist collective in China.
44:53It's still run as a workers' cooperative,
44:56and here you can get a distant feel of Mao's brave new world.
45:02It was to be based on new values,
45:04doing away with centuries of stifling Confucian tradition.
45:08China was to be organised into collective farms and work brigades.
45:13Our economy will overtake Britain in a few years, Mao said.
45:20All of it was directed by the rigid and secretive Chinese Communist Party,
45:25with Stalin's advisers controlling the people's lives from cradle to grave.
45:32But there were real achievements, especially in public health,
45:36in education and literacy.
45:38There was also a great improvement in the role and status of women.
45:43All of this has helped shape today's China.
45:47The government and the government are trying to raise money.
45:49Now we have to make money.
45:50I have to make money more and?
45:52They would have to make money more and,
45:54and I will not pay for money on the house.
45:56They would not pay for money for it.
45:58We would have to make money more and,
45:59and then go back to the country and eat more and more than that.
46:02We are in the middle of the people,
46:03of the support of the government as well.
46:05The mayor still believes in Mao's vision.
46:13Though out of step with the rest of China today,
46:16the mayor still believes in Mao's vision.
46:35But Maoism went against the very grain of Chinese civilisation.
46:40Its economic ideas were calamitous.
46:42The collectivisation of farming massively disrupted society.
46:49Mao responded to the failures with a great leap forward,
46:52a disastrous drive to industrialise the countryside.
46:56That led to the Great Famine.
46:59Between 1959 and 1961,
47:01it's now thought well over 30 million people died.
47:09By the end of the 50s,
47:11the imposition of Maoism on the Chinese people had clearly failed.
47:15And Mao was sidelined as leader of the party.
47:18But he wouldn't let go.
47:23In 1964, aged 70,
47:25he regained control and launched the Cultural Revolution.
47:32Frustrated by the Chinese people's loyalty to their culture,
47:35Mao urged millions of young people, red guards,
47:39to smash old customs, old ideas, Confucian values.
47:44I don't know.
47:46I don't know.
47:50Your name is?
47:51What is it?
47:52You Jia.
47:53You Jia.
47:54OK, my name is Michael.
47:55Every Chinese family suffered.
47:57The Baos, originally from Tang Yue in Anhui,
48:00who we followed through this story, were just one.
48:07Loyal village officers in the Ming dynasty,
48:09philanthropic salt merchants in the Qing,
48:12they now faced terror and abuse,
48:15but also the destruction of their treasured past.
48:21So how many generations here?
48:22Six generations Ming,
48:25seven generations Qing.
48:27So Mr Bao is 30th,
48:29and the little boy is 32nd generation.
48:32During the Taiping rebellion,
48:34the family had risked their lives
48:35to save this 18th century painting of their ancestors.
48:39And now they went through it all again.
48:41And now they went through it all again.
48:42And now we're talking about the history of the Chinese
49:03And as Mr. Bao told the tale, it was as if once more the voice of the Chinese people
49:18was speaking, their love of their history and their attachment to their old culture.
49:33When I was in a village, who was in a Pentagon's office,
49:39in the past, when the Albanians arrived and arrived,
49:42at two to eight to eight to one,
49:45and he was back in the morning.
49:47His alma mater, and all the famous people's and many people's letters,
49:52became up my mind and all of them were in the mud.
50:03Mao died in 1976, aged 83, corrupted by power and his messianic personality cult.
50:24Today he's still a hero for many.
50:27Mao memorabilia are everywhere, photos, magazines and posters, and of course the little red book.
50:37The man who many here still think for all his mistakes made China great again.
50:43It's said that in his last days he was obsessively reading Sir Maquan.
50:48Many lessons for rulers of all times in Chinese history in that famous historian's work with
50:55its message to the emperor that here's the history of China unfolding before you and
50:59you will see that over the epochs there have been chaos and destruction and violence and
51:05disorder for most of that period and that the periods of good order and harmony have been
51:11short in the history of China and this tells you the achievement of harmony in government
51:17is a very difficult thing and needs to be very carefully tended once you've got there.
51:25There were those who said of course that had he died in 1956 his achievements would have
51:30been remembered as one of the great rulers of China.
51:34But on what happened afterwards even the party admitted.
51:38Comrade Mao mistook right for wrong and the people for the enemy and therein lies his tragedy.
51:47Mao thought his revolution was unfinished but after his death the party turned its back on
51:59Marxism for help to rebuild China his successor Deng Xiaoping went to America.
52:05The eyes of Texas were on Deng Xiaoping today.
52:08We learned some new things about Deng.
52:11He likes astronauts, cowboys and basketball and perhaps a new image for communist China's leading man.
52:18Deng Xiaoping not only went west but went western.
52:24Deng's great opening up would turn China into a capitalist society
52:28and brought the greatest lifting out of poverty in human history.
52:31And just as in the May the fourth movement in 1919 new freedoms swiftly beckoned.
52:38For the first time in huge numbers the ordinary men and women of Beijing the old and the young
52:45professors and taxi drivers have joined the student protest.
52:48In 1989 another great demonstration in Tiananmen Square also called for change but the party feared the loss of
52:58its own monopoly on power. The protesters were brutally crushed. Their protest dropped from history.
53:08Over the next 25 years China simply grew richer and richer.
53:14If a historian had been trying to predict what China would look like in the early 21st century
53:21she would almost certainly have got it entirely wrong. They would never have guessed that China
53:25would be one of the most thriving capitalist societies in the history of the world although
53:30one that's still under authoritarian rule.
53:36I think China embarked what I call the long march for modernity since the European wars
53:43the world's because its elite realized it had to change. It had to catch up with the west. It has to modernize.
53:54So that march is still going on.
53:59And that means embracing history too, good and bad.
54:05For to be open about history after all is a foundation of a better present
54:09and a better future.
54:16Here in the city of Wuxi the Qin family have gathered for their annual reunion
54:21to celebrate their history, the incredible durability of the Chinese family
54:26and its place in the story of the nation.
54:29I think it's remarkable that all of us here today
54:32trace our ancestry to this remarkable poet in the Song Dynasty
54:38who was born almost a thousand years ago.
54:42And today the descendants can be found all over China.
54:48Like all Chinese families, the Qin's have weathered the storms of the 20th century.
54:52They've had rightists and leftists, journalists and calligraphers
54:56and even a hero of the long march whose daughters are here today to remember him.
55:04The Qin's family history can influence China's history.
55:08Because this family has been to Wuxi for 900 years.
55:13So it's been through a lot of times.
55:15The wounds of the last century are fading now.
55:24The Chinese people, the real heroes and heroines of our story,
55:28are savouring life to the full again.
55:35It's the festival of the Chinese New Year.
55:38Everybody's favourite holiday, when all families try to get back together
55:43and the whole country grinds to a halt for two weeks.
55:51It's a time of auspiciousness and fun, a time for letting go.
55:57And at the heart of it all are the old Chinese beliefs about good fortune and prosperity.
56:07The old rituals of cooking and eating together.
56:13In every home, as the saying goes, the four generations under one roof.
56:25Just like the rest of us, the people of China are concerned about the future,
56:30about the environment, the effects of materialism, about freedom itself.
56:35But they're united, as always, by their common culture and history,
56:40by the things they've valued for so long.
56:43The story of China is part of the history of all the peoples of our small planet.
57:07And the next chapter, in many ways, will be more momentous than any that have gone before.
57:15Here at the altar of heaven in Beijing, just over a hundred years ago,
57:19the last emperors of China performed the ancient rituals to maintain harmony between humanity,
57:27the earth and the cosmos.
57:30Fitting in this place, isn't it? You almost feel as if you're suspended between heaven and earth.
57:36And now that ancient idea is all the more meaningful and urgent to China and to the world.
57:47The Chinese government has set its goal over the next 30 years to become a prosperous and democratic socialist society.
58:04In that, the rest of the world can only wish them well.
58:09For after the 4,000-year epic of Chinese civilization, with all its triumphs and tragedies,
58:16and its almost boundless invention and creativity,
58:20the world needs a prosperous and peaceful China like never before.
58:26And the story of China is available to pre-order on BBC DVD,
58:38and you can buy, download and keep through BBC Store and other suppliers.
58:42Tomorrow at nine on BBC Two, Judi Dench and Steve Coogan journey together in the BAFTA-winning Philomena.
58:49Next tonight, Olympic and Paralympic gold medalists Nicola Adams,
58:52Jade Jones and Hannah Cockcroft join Lord Co on The Clare Balding Show.
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