Morning Sun | The Film

American Historical Review
June 2004, pp. 886-887
Yomi Braester, University of Washington

The Cultural Revolution presents China historians with challenges comparable to the conundrums faced by students of the Jewish Holocaust. It is hard to explain how, within two months, from June to August 1966, the Red Guard became a decisive and destructive force. What banal details can account for the seeming madness of a generation turned brutal to the point of denouncing parents and beating teachers to death? The well-wrought documentary Morning Sun is the latest attempt to place the years of chaos in context. Although it does not uncover many new details, the film's coherent use of visual material provides a fresh and convincing examination of the dynamics that paved the way for the Cultural Revolution.

Morning Sun's major contribution consists in focusing on contemporary images and foregrounding their importance in molding the collective mindset. The film opens with the climax of The East Is Red, the 1964 revolutionary musical. The East Is Red accompanies the narrative throughout, as a visual illustration of the ideals imbued in the generation of the Red Guard. Yet the musical is also presented as an active agent in shaping the period, one of the many visual artifacts that determined the daily behavior and ideological beliefs of those who took part in the Cultural Revolution. Morning Sun validates the argument that images were a major force in the cultural makeover. The film draws attention to the scope of cinematic propaganda, including musicals such as The East Is Red, pseudo-documentaries such as Lei Feng (1964), feature films such as Never Forget! (1964), and dubbed productions from the Soviet Union and North Korea such as The Gadfly (USSR, 1955). The last in particular is used to show the contradictory messages, from revolutionary sacrifice to repudiating paternalist authority, with which the Red Guard had to contend. The Soviet film provided the Red Guard generation with a vehicle for fashioning their ideology before, during, and after the Cultural Revolution.

Clips from The East Is Red and other contemporary films punctuate the initial exuberance and multiple disenchantments of the Red Guard recounted by prominent members of the generation. The interviewees include children of high officials who had fallen from grace. Their testimony ranges from inside stories of party factionalism -- Liu Ting and her mother, Wang Guangmei, tell of the persecution of Ting's father, Mao Zedong's designated heir Liu Shaoqi -- to more personal experiences, such as Li Nanyang's repudiation of her father, Mao's secretary Li Rui, and later realization that he had been wronged. Of the same age group are Red Guard celebrities, such as Luo Xiaohai, one of the first to use the appellation "Red Guard," and Song Binbin, the young woman chosen to greet Mao at Tiananmen. Their personal anecdotes capture the absurdity of the Cultural Revolution better than dry accounts. Song tells how Mao commented on her name, Binbin, which conveys refinement, and said that she had better "be militant." Without her consent, newspapers changed Binbin's name to Yaowu, literally "be militant." Later, the new name landed her in trouble, and she had to change her name yet again, choosing a random Chinese character. Even the present interview does not show her face, to protect her anonymity.

The combination of oral history and visual materials provides a palpable exposition of revolutionary culture. For example, Morning Sun shares Roderick MacFarquhar's thesis that traces the events of 1966 to the intraparty debates during the Great Leap Forward. Yet in focusing on everyday experience, the film shows how high-level enmity could be manifested in grassroots strife. The Red Guards' paranoia and militaristic rhetoric may well have been rooted in the rift with the Soviet Union and the tension between the Chinese Communist Party and the People's Liberation Army, yet they became part of the youth's mindset and vocabulary through the contemporary counter-espionage films, which called upon children to be vigilant against counterrevolutionaries in their midst, even if they should turn out to be one's own teachers or parents.

Morning Sun, together with the superb accompanying website (www.morningsun.org), are welcome teaching tools. High school, college, and graduate students alike stand to gain insights into the dissonances of the culture of revolution and the dilemmas of the Red Guard generation. As do all treatments of atrocities of this order, the film will still leave spectators wondering how it could all have taken place.