Newly re-available video on China
Rebecca Small mentioned this morning that her comparative class "just watched a chilling PBS clip on the cultural revolution in China. It always makes for a silent classroom!"I asked her which video was so powerful, and she replied that it was "PBS' The Mao Years. It is out of print, but some are able to find old copies for sale on Amazon."
It turns out that The Mao Years was part of a 6-hour documentary series produced in 1997, and it was out of print until last July. It's now available on DVD at Amazon and from the producer, Zeitgeist Films.I have not seen The Mao Years, but I have seen other segments and they are well-done and good teaching materials. If you have time in your course for a good history documentary, The Mao Years or Born Under the Red Flag about the two decades after Mao's death would be good ones to use.
Product Description from the Zeitgeist web site:
"China: A Century of Revolution is a six-hour tour de force journey through that country s most tumultuous period. First televised on PBS, this award-winning documentary series presents an astonishingly candid view of a once-secret nation with rare archival footage, insightful historical commentary and stunning eyewitness accounts from citizens who struggled through China s most decisive century.
"China in Revolution charts the country s most violent era where decades of civil war and foreign invasions led to the bloody battle for power between Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek. The Mao Years examines the turbulent era of Mao s attempts to forge a new China from the war-ravaged and poverty-stricken nation. Mao s death begins Born Under the Red Flag, which follows the country s new leadership of Deng Xiaoping and its unlikely transformation into an extraordinary hybrid of communist-centralized politics with an ever-expanding free market economy."
The prices are $31.00 at Amazon or $35.00 at Zeitgeist.
Labels: change, China, economics, history, politics
posted by Ken Wedding @ 10:22 AM
1 Comments:
Ken,
I've used China: A Century of Revolution in classes before. It works well and the Cultural Revolution section is a good overview. The most chilling part, according to my students, is a prim and proper women in her Beijing apartment talking about how her schoolmates beat to death an elderly man, a tale she ends by wondering what she would have done if she hadn't been late to their gathering.
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