Morning Sun | Reviews

Toronto Star: Recalling China's madness

Like the recent Weather Underground, Carma Hinton, Richard Gordon and Geremie R. Barme's Morning Sun is a documentary record of '60s student political idealism run amok.

Where Bill Siegel and Sam Green's movie provided a haunting account of how white, middle-class American idealism mutated into a particularly explosive form of revolutionary radical chic as the 1960s shaded into the '70s, Hinton and company's film tells the story of the so-called Cultural Revolution in China: The decade of ultra-fundamentalist political orthodoxy that saw Mao Zedong and thousands of Chinese student supporters — under the rubric of the Red Guard — conduct a brutal, decade-long purge of those who they considered enemies of the socialist state.

Like Weather Underground, Morning Sun mixes fascinating, archival-based history — including some astounding footage of Maoist operatic spectacle, student re-enactments of The Great March, and rare footage of Mao speaking at the Ninth Party Congress in 1969 — with ruefully revealing interviews with people who were both persecuted and persecutors. (And, because the Cultural Revolution was such a terminal form of political cancer, some were both.)

The widow and daughter of China's scapegoated President Liu Shaoqi look back at what their family was subjected to, and the daughter of another denounced official, Li Rui, discusses how she turned her back on her own father, whom she didn't see for years.

Former members of the Red Guard recollect in shamed horror some of their actions — wrecking Buddhist temples, beating denounced state officials, turning against friends and family members — while surviving victims recount what it was like to have the full force of state-supported ideological insanity turn against you.

Like the story of the misguided American revolutionaries who wound up spending years hiding from the FBI, Morning Sun is remarkably measured in its approach, aiming not to condemn the actions of the Red Guard — who, to a person, condemn themselves anyway — but to understand the mechanisms whereby idealism turns into totalitarianism. A valuable contribution not only to the understanding of recent Chinese history, but to the tumult of a globally unsettled age.

Geoff Pevere, Toronto Star, Nov. 12, 2003