Prising open Mao's revolution:

Rays of humanity shine in a new film on China's past

“I had never lost a fight in my life, [but] in those circumstances if I had fought back, my whole family would have been destroyed. So I decided to show them that a man taking a beating could have dignity and prowess.

“I didn’t let out a sound as they hit me.I used martial arts techniques to control my breathing. I counted the blows. They hit me 224 times, my shirt was soaked through with blood. It stuck to my back.”

- Huang Yongyu, a Chinese artist, recalls a beating he received during the Cultural Revolution in the film Morning Sun.

It is all Gough Whitlam’s fault.

If the Whitlam Government had not become the first Western nation to re-establish diplomatic relationships with China in the early 1970s, Geremie Barmé would not have been catapulted into the midst of the Cultural Revolution.

If Geremie Barmé had not been able to spend his early 20s studying revolutionary literature, Marxism and Maoism in chaotic Chinese universities still spasmodically paralysed by death throes of the Cultural Revolution, he may have chosen a different career path.

And if the now Professor Barmé had chosen a different path, we probably wouldn’t have been gifted with Morning Sun, a landmark new documentary coming to Australian screens later this year, which offers deep insights into the complexities of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

“Prior to Morning Sun, most media representations of the Cultural Revolution tended to treat it as a mad moment with crazy Mao using young students to overthrow the status quo. The reality was much more complex and we wanted to show that,” Professor Barmé said.

The film provides an invitation to step into the shoes of some key players in the Cultural Revolution, which swept China from 1964—1978.

It resulted in the death of untold numbers of people, the internal exile of writers, academics, teachers, and key party figures (among many others) and the biggest mass movement of people ever. Around 100 million people are estimated to have been uprooted from their homes and relocated around the country  — the resulting sense of dislocation can be sensed throughout the film.

History struggles to adequately translate the quantum of pain and suffering when millions are involved in societal upheaval — but equally, history generally fails to paint a full-colour portrait of the perpetrators. Sure, there are biographies of Hitler and Stalin and Mao, but what of the millions caught up in the fervour of their wake?

“The English-language books about the Cultural Revolution tend to be written by victims — or people who portray themselves as such. There are virtually none by the perpetrators, or even of those who were both victim and perpetrator. We wanted to bring those stories out, to better present the complexities of the Cultural Revolution,” Professor Barmé said.

While it is over 25 years since the Cultural Revolution came to an end, its legacy is still very powerful. Luo Xiaohai, a founder of the Red Guards, speaks at length for the first time about his motivation to foment rebellion — but because of the controversy of his role and his position in business in the US, still gives his interview in shadows. He speaks of the exhilaration of being endorsed by Mao and his disillusionment with the violence and aimlessness of the revolution as it progressed.

The film also reveals Song Binbin, the woman who first pinned a Red Guard armband on Mao in 1966 — who also subsequently became disillusioned.

To read Li Rui's story click here

On paper, the film is officially the result of two and a half years of hard work for Professor Barmé; directing the film with husband-and-wife filmmakers Dr Carma Hinton and Mr Richard Gordon, while also serving as head of Pacific and Asian History at the Research School of Pacific and Asian studies at ANU and supervising PhD students, as well as editing the journal East Asian History.

In reality, Morning Sun is the culmination of far more. Dr Hinton was born in China and was raised there until 1971, when the Cultural Revolution was in full swing. Professor Barmé was one of only a few dozen Western students allowed into China in the early 70s, travelling there in 1974 on a student exchange program, living for more than three years in the country, and spending many months in China most years since.

Together, the two had personally witnessed much of the Cultural Revolution and rather than produce an outsider’s caricature of the time, they wanted to present a more intimate portrait of the revolution’s complexities and the cultural and psychological dimensions of one of the most baffling periods of modern history.

The trios’ first movie together, The Gate of Heavenly Peace (1995), a three-hour documentary about the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, won many awards and was seen by hundreds of thousands of viewers around the world.
It took some years to resolve to cover the Cultural Revolution and two more years of research before filming for Morning Sun started in earnest in 2001.

“The film contains very rare archival footage — for example, footage where you could hear Mao talking, which hasn’t been seen in China since 1969.  He had a squeaky voice that propagandists thought would undermine his authority if it was heard too often,” Professor Barmé said.

“Filmmakers and photographers working during the Cultural Revolution had to sign for each roll of film, then document what images they had captured and hand the film stock in for processing. As a result it is very rare to obtain films or high-quality photographs which are not officially-sanctioned material.

“The film also has some interviews with people who have never really spoken in depth before, and it takes a lot of time to get hold of that footage and organise that kind of in-depth interview.”

Morning Sun is unlikely to be screened in China, but has screened across Europe and the United States to more than 300,000 people. It will be screened by the ABC later this year and at selected independent cinemas.

For more information, visit the Morning Sun website at: www.morningsun.org