This series provides a quite remarkable video resource for teaching about twentieth-century China at the college level. It is doubtful anyone would want to use all six hours of the material, but the quality of the production is high throughout and some sections could be exceptionally useful material in any class dealing with twentieth-century China.
Because the outstanding historical footage points out the great gulf in lifestyle and expectations that separate our students from most people living in twentieth-century China, the film may also be used profitably in high school classes. Yet, the combination of voice-over narrative and dubbed interviews that characterize all six hours of the material may be difficult to assimilate for less advanced audiences.
Sue Williams and her collaborators worked on this program, as can be seen from the production dates, for over a decade, so it is no rush job. Its greatest strength is the combination of a clear narrative line, marvelous choices of historical film, and lengthy interviews with Chinese participants. Much of the historical film sections are in black and white and show flooding, military action, public executions, great public demonstrations in Beijing, and other scenes that convey to the viewer an eye-witness sense. The authenticity of archival footage overall is heightened by what appear to be faked bandages swathing the head of the American newsreel reporter, Floyd Gibbons, as he reported on the very real destruction in Shanghai as it was under Japanese attack in 1937.
Together with archival film, it is the many interviews that give this video its strongest quality of immediacy and reliability. The six hours contain some quite remarkable interviews with important persons such as Chen Li-fu, the conservative modernizing ideologue close to Chiang Kai-shek, and Yang Chengwu, a Chinese Communist peasant general who participated in the Long March, as well as obscure
figures such as Sun Mingjiu, the soldier who took Chiang Kai-shek prisoner at Xi'an in 1936. For the earliest portion, where so many of the participants are now dead, the interviewees include figures such as Chiang Wei-kuo, the son of Chiang Kai-shek who describes his recollections of his father and Sun Yat-sen as they talked in the garden.
In all three parts of the video the same structure is used: historical film footage interspersed with interviews. Most of the interviewees are Chinese, although there are some Americans such as John Paton Davies and Edward Rice, veteran U.S. State Department officials with long experience in China. The production clearly benefited from close consultation with academic specialists, in particular Professor Paul Pickowicz of the University of California at San Diego who has had a long interest in using film for teaching history. These academics remain off screen in this production. Their presence is reflected in the narrative and in the choice of topics covered.
The formatting reflects this material's broadcast television origins in that each two-hour cassette is further broken down into what were two-hour broadcast programs. The series has a strict, but useful chronological sequence reflected in the titles of each hour-long segment: "The Battle for Survival, 1911-36", "Fighting for the Future, 1937-49", "Catch the Stars and Moon, 1949-60", "It's Right to Rebel, 1960-76", "Surviving Mao, 1976-84" and "The New Generation, 1985-97".
Within each program there are topical segments. For example, the "Battle for Survival, 1911-36" deals well with both Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek's leadership of the Nationalist Party, The Communists' Long March, and Chiang Kai-shek's kidnapping in Xi'an in 1936. The last program "The New Generation" deals with the student movements of 1986-87 as well as the Tiananmen incident of 1989 through a combination of on-the-scene footage of the demonstrations and the Communist Party leadership activities interspersed with interviews with Chinese participants and observers. There are short, but effective sections on China's one-child population policy and Deng Xiaoping's continuing drive for economic development in the early 1990s. The tone of the new generation is artfully caught through an interview with the rock star, Cui Jian, and the use of his music in the opening and closing sequences of this program.
For teachers there will be a tendency to use these videos as hour-long, stand-alone substitutes for a lecture or as a lecture supplement. In fact, the material could work much better as a short presentation on a class topic centered on one of the five-to-twenty-minute segments from a particular program. Thus, from "It's Right to Rebel" an instructor could use the longish segment on the Cultural Revolution, or the shorter one on the death of Lin Biao to provide a narrative and some wonderful historical footage in part of a larger class session devoted to those topics. There obviously is a lot the film does not cover, so it obviously will not replace a text or lectures, but is probably well worth its price for the supplementary material it can provide.
The teacher's guide was not included in the materials I reviewed, but my guess is that individual teachers would find little difficulty finding the segments of this long narrative film that would be useful in their classroom. Even when I found myself disagreeing with the narrative, I still felt the video could be used as a good foil in a classroom presentation. For example, I felt statements about Taiwan's heavy investment in South China in the 1980s are somewhat misleading in that only after 1987 did this important change in the direction of Taiwanese investment and trade get underway in any meaningful way, but in spite of that difference in dating, the presentation could be used to frame a discussion of what the import of this growing trade and investment will mean for both the Chinese mainland and Taiwan.
One problem that plagues videos is that they often lose their usefulness as the material becomes dated. I doubt this will be much of a problem with this series. Certainly the material in the first five hours is so clearly grounded on important topics in twentieth century Chinese history, the series can be profitably used for many years to come. This six-hour series, to my knowledge, is the best available compilation of historical materials on twentieth-century Chinese history. It is well worth the price.
