To Live (1994)
Directed by Zhang Yimou

The film portrays the daily life and struggles of one 
family from the Chinese civil war to the end of the 
Cultural Revolution. The film is an accurate portrayal in 
the sense that there are certainly many people who could 
tell stories similar to the film's. But in the end, by 
choosing "apolitical" protagonists, the film obscures the 
most important political question of the times: revolution 
*for whom*. And by concentrating on the sacrifices of one 
family the film downplays the tremendous gains the Chinese 
people made under Maoist leadership. Western bourgeois 
critics of communism are calling this film a passionate 
indictment of Maoism (even though they cannot tell the 
difference between Deng and Mao). They point to the 
children's deaths as examples of the Maoist state's 
willingness to "selfishly sacrifice its people" and claim 
that the state could not just allow the Chinese people "to 
simply live." But this criticism misses the point: China 
was an extremely poor nation (thanks to centuries of 
imperialist and feudal domination), so disease, poverty, 
and exhausting work were commonplace before and after the 
revolution. The revolution aimed to change the 
relationships which kept the Chinese people in poverty - 
and in this the Chinese Communist Party largely succeeded. 
For example, life expectancy doubled from 35 in the '40s to 
69 in the '70s.