Documentary

52 mins
French / English
1994

Philippe COUTURE

Les Films du VIllage

HAVE A GLIMPSE AT WHAT IS GOING ON IN CHINA POST-MAOISTE SOCIETY

Today China is waking up as if these four decades of Maoist harshness and austerity had just been a bad dream. Mao is dead, long live Mao. His successor Deng Xiao Ping, who has been ruling since 1978, is the father of a reform which has brought the most spectacular changes in the History of modern China. If contradctions hold the world together, then we can easily infer that China have a long life ahead. To achieve Communism thanks to Capitalist methods is the risky entreprise into which the leaders of the Party are urging the population to get involved in. Today the model to conform to is the consumming society, its rule the race to profit. The economic growth is so overwhelming that it is starting to become frightening for the ruling class itself. The gap between the wages is fearsome and the cultural and moral references are more than dubious. Joining the values of Communism and Capitalism of Asia and the Western world has proved to be a acomplex and risky task. Nonetheless the future of China depends on the success of this mixing. The issue of this process is made all the more difficult because of the disintegration of the social fabric and of the impending disparition of the political patriarch. How much longer does the Party intend to impose its hegemony? And what will be the price to pay for? In the midst of all these doubts, there is one certainty: the rest of the world will not remain indifferent to the strenght and extent of this phenomenon.