Reddest Red Sun | The Miracles of Chairman Mao

The Maoist revolution was one in which sheer human will, with the correct political orientation, could overcome all obstacles and transform the world itself. It was a revolution that in many ways had its well-springs in the spiritual yearnings of the previous decades. If the industrialized West represented modernity achieved through capital, the spiritual East, exemplified by revolutionary China, gave form to an alternative form of modernity, a different path to the future.

The Miracles of Chairman Mao features short excerpts from two films depicting the miraculous healing of the deaf and dumb:

"A Song of Triumph for Chairman Mao's Proletarian Line on Public Health," a 1969 documentary film produced by the Chinese government showing PLA medical workers treating deaf-mute children at a school in rural China;

"Youth," a 1977 feature film by Xie Jin, with Joan Chen in her screen debut as a deaf-mute peasant whose life is transformed by the curative miracles of PLA-administered acupuncture.