The stage is Tiananmen Square. The hapless heroine (Yamei, literally 'Dumb Sister'), having joined up with a Red Guard Long March troop that she encountered trudging by her village, has travelled to Beijing with them, the heart of the.revolution. She joins in a review of the revolutionary masses by Chairman Mao, one of eight such occasions. The time is the fall of 1966; popular enthusiasm for the Cultural Revolution is at its height, as is the hysteria to protect the Great Helmsman and to propagate his works.

Yamei attempts to cheer her own greeting out to Mao. Although he is a distant speck on the rostrum of Tiananmen Gate, the Great Helmsman is brought into close focus in the film through the use of archival footage taken from various Red Guard reviews. Yamei's plaintive well wishes are literally muted, falling on her own deaf ears. Mao, himself forever silent at these occasions, can however hear the thunderous (dare we say deafening) clamour of the single, unifying prayer "Long live Chairman Mao!" that issues from the lips of everyone in the square except for Yamei. For the film audience, however, rather than being lost in the crowd Yamei becomes the center of all dramatic tension. In particular her frustrated grunts are noticed by a middle-aged woman PLA doctor, Dr. Xiang.

At this moment the theme song of the film, "The Thousand-Year-Old Iron Tree Must Blossom," booms out with the full pitch of revolutionary romanticism common to Cultural Revolution propaganda. This is accompanied by a montage of angry waves breaking on sea-side boulders and the sight of an unstoppable tide surging forth. Such watery imagery was also typical of the metaphorical language of the era, one in which tides, floods, surging seas and roiling waves represent mass strength, the sublimation of emotion, and the inevitability of historical change.