Word: communiste
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...early 1949, China's in the endgame of its civil war and Mao Zedong's communist forces are poised to take Beijing. Just south of the Yangtze, in Nanjing, Mao's archfoe, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, holds court as the leader of the Republic of China and its Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) government. But Mao believes that winning Beijing first will deal a mortal blow to the morale of the KMT. En route to what will be the future People's Republic's capital, he and his top lieutenants pause in a town that has been deserted by shopkeepers and merchants...
...docudrama-style film begins in 1945 with the then temporarily allied communists and Nationalists celebrating the defeat of the Japanese and culminates with the declaration of the People's Republic by Mao at Beijing's Tiananmen Square. It purports to tell the true and full story of the tangled dance between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the KMT to forge a new, unified China. As you'd expect, many - but surprisingly not all - elements of the KMT are portrayed as malevolent and capricious, and the CCP justly triumphs (of course!). Yet Founding goes beyond routine propaganda. What's striking...
...Because the CCP now gains its legitimacy almost solely from the material wealth it has created and is communist only in name, it has to recast the past to justify the present. Thus, in Founding, class struggle is hardly depicted or mentioned. Mao not only needs a capitalist to provide him with a cigarette; he and his cohorts admit they are ignorant about economics, which they acknowledge is essential to running the country. The message: Mao was great at consolidating the nation under the communist banner, but he was clueless about development; it's today's CCP that made...
...born in 1957 and spent my childhood in China's remote Xinjiang region, where my father, Ai Qing, had been exiled. He was a poet, not a revolutionary, but the Communist Party had no tolerance for free thinkers. So he spent years cleaning toilets, enduring beatings and public humiliation. To me, it was a lesson in how horribly humans can treat one another...
...What I'm talking about is nothing revolutionary like the democracy that the Communist Party once promised. It is the fundamental matter of protecting one's individual dignity. It is about seeking answers to simple questions - like why so many students died in Sichuan. It is about demanding answers and accountability from one's government. If Chinese citizens do that, then this 60th anniversary will not just be about the Party congratulating itself. It will be the final hurrah of a dying system...