The Age of Revolution The Story of China

The story of modern China begins here in Canton in the south.

In the 1830s, China was still the greatest state on Earth,

but the Europeans were growing in influence.

In Canton, the new ideas of the West were mingling

with the culture of old China -

traders selling opium, missionaries preaching Christ.

At this time, a chance meeting took place

between an American missionary and a Chinese student,

whose name was Hong.

This, in the 1830s, was the dividing line between

the European quarter and the old Chinese city of Canton.

And here, Hong meets the American missionary,

the Reverend Edwin Stevens,

Yale-educated, wearing Chinese clothes -

long-sleeved coat, his hair in a bun -

and he's handing out Christian pamphlets illegally.

And he stops Hong and he says to him,

"Follow the Christian God and you will reach the highest glory."

And he gives him one of the pamphlets

and in it, Hong sees the story of Noah and the flood.

And he reads his own name -

"Hong", literally, the flood - God's instrument to punish humanity

for failing to follow the path of righteousness.

Believing himself to be God's Chinese son,

Hong set out to overthrow the Qing Empire...

..unleashing the first of three huge upheavals

out of which modern China would emerge.

Aargh!

DEEP RUMBLING

'In 1841, here in the Pearl River, the British blasted the Chinese

'to defeat in the First Opium War.'

The Chinese coastal forts were useless -

their junks no match for ironclads and rocket launchers.

The British forced the Chinese to give them trading concessions -

treaty ports, like Canton and Shanghai.

And here, they began to build European-style villas,

warehouses and churches.

So, the Qing Government gave way to the British brand

of international politics.

And, as you can see, the British started to make themselves at home.

'In the strange, unsettling aftermath of the Opium War,

'the student Hong headed to the hills.'

He became a village teacher out in the wild countryside of the south.

And here, the Bible texts

began to work on his mind...

..especially the prophet Isaiah.

"Your country is desolate.

"Strangers are devouring your land before your eyes.

"Why be downtrodden any more?

"Rise up and revolt."

The Taiping Rebellion began deep in the mountains,

beyond Guiping. Very isolated places that, in the 19th century,

were only joined by walking tracks.

Really out of the way.

Here was fertile ground for revolution.

Since the 1600s, China's population had nearly trebled.

A stagnating economy brought mass poverty and unemployment,

the rulers were oppressive.

And Hong's preaching on social justice

found a willing audience.

May we go and have a look at the place where Hong stayed?

-Before the rising.

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

-Look at this.

Fantastic.

Isn't that wonderful?

So, this was a family house, was it, once upon a time?

THEY SPEAK OWN LANGUAGE

-Yeah, it was used to people staying here.

-Ah.

MAN SPEAKS IN OWN LANGUAGE

TRANSLATION:

Hong and his disciples started to organise village meetings.

Here in Old Wood Village, they enthused the local people

with their revolutionary ideas.

Hello!

Hi!

'Hong and his close friend, Feng, were educated men

'and with their traditional respect for learning,

'the illiterate villagers listened.'

Hello.

So, we've come to look for the Taiping.

TRANSLATION:

Hong had identified the Christian God

'with the High God of ancient China and he wanted to create

'heaven's kingdom on earth by overthrowing'

the corrupt Qing Empire to make a golden age

when society lived in harmony,

when justice was for the poor too.

For families like the Zengs, it was a powerful message.

We get kind of mesmerised by the religious background

to the Taiping and it is incredible, isn't it?

God's Chinese son!

But you mustn't forget, it's a great peasant uprising.

This is the poor, rural, agrarian workforce who are rising up

against their traditional enemies - the landlords and the rich.

Through the 1840s, the movement grew

and they gathered thousands of followers.

The Qing Government ordered troops to put them down,

but in such out-of-the-way places, it was too late.

They created revolutionary cells in hundreds of villages.

This is Rushing Water Village.

Hong's right-hand man, Feng, stayed here till the eve of the uprising.

'This is the site of the school where Feng

'taught and spread the Taiping ideology.'

Ah!

'You could say THIS is where the great rebellion started.'

Ah!

The school was on this site, then? Is that right?

-The school started here...

-Yeah.

-..and amongst somewhere there

-and then they're not really sure.

-Ah.

'Back then, today's Zeng family remember

'their ancestors were illiterate.

'That's why they first brought Feng in to teach them.'

MAN SPEAKS IN OWN LANGUAGE

TRANSLATION:

It's hard to imagine, isn't it?

Such earth-shaking historical events beginning

in such out-of-the-way places.

But by 1849, these little villages under Thistle Mountain

were just humming with omens and visions and prophecies.

Jesus was making regular descents down to Earth to bring Hong

messages from heaven in his dreams.

Angels in golden robes were giving succour to the Taiping teachers

and God himself, in his great black dragon robe with his golden beard,

was showing Hong, in his trances,

the demon armies which he must overcome.

Then in spring 1850, Hong put on the yellow robe of the empire

and gave the command for all the Taiping worshippers of God

to gather together and descend into the plain.

The revolution was about to begin.

Soon, Hong had an army of 100,000 men

and they defeated the Qing forces in the south.

The tale is long told by the traditional storytellers.

TRANSLATION:

On March 19th 1853, Nanjing fell and Hong was enthroned

as ruler of God's heavenly kingdom in his new Jerusalem.

'So, the Taiping had gained power, but what would they do with it?

'It's a question faced by all China's revolutionaries.'

There's the throne of the Heavenly King.

Once God's kingdom here on Earth had been established in Nanjing,

a blizzard of ideological pronouncements came

pouring from this throne.

They had printing presses here, they had a whole workshop

for woodblock cutting for their publications -

their translations of the Old and New Testament.

They banned opium, tobacco, alcohol,

foot binding, prostitution, gambling.

They separated the sexes,

there was the death penalty for sex between men.

Most important of all,

China was to be classless.

Private ownership of property,

private ownership of land were abolished.

All land would be owned by the State and distributed by the State.

And this would be accompanied by a purging of the language

of its foreign elements,

which had been brought in by the alien Manchu conquerors.

A new world of words for a new time.

The Taiping State spread its power across

the rich heartland of the south.

And here in Nanjing, the people got used to

a new kind of fundamentalist rule,

with new laws condemning old pleasures.

In the backstreets, you can still find traces

of the Taiping's 16-year rule.

This was the house of one of their leaders.

'This house belonged to the Li family

'before the Taiping rebels took over the city.

'They fled into the countryside

'and a leading Taiping prince took this over as his own residence.'

And he has the house painted with Taiping-themed murals.

No representation of the human form.

They were iconoclasts.

They destroyed images and human representations of Daoist temples,

Buddhist and Confucian shrines, wherever they'd gone.

So, the images from nature of birds, horses, landscapes,

over there, the five-storey wooden watchtower,

were the kind that the Taiping armies constructed.

In one of the inner halls, the Taiping prince had had

the Chinese symbol for long life painted on the wall.

But long life, the Taiping leaders would not achieve.

So, China now had rival dynasties -

the Qing in the north in Beijing

and the Taiping in the south.

But for the British and the other foreigners,

their stake in China

was too big to jeopardise,

so they lent the Chinese Government

advisors and the latest weaponry to help crush the rebels.

Eventually, the Qing massed a million men against them,

and in 1864, nearly 16 years after they left Thistle Mountain,

the Taiping were forced back behind the walls of Nanjing.

TRANSLATION:

Soon the rebels inside the city were decimated by disease and starvation.

And then Hong himself fell ill and died.

WIND WHISTLES, METAL CLANKS

By the end, over 20 million people had died of famine,

disease and fighting.

The Qing thought they'd weathered the storm.

The war-shattered city of Nanjing was rebuilt

and at that point, the Qing could still see themselves

as the centre of the world.

But the Taiping Rebellion was a dire warning.

Just before he was executed,

one of the Taiping leaders gave this advice to the Chinese government -

"Buy from the foreigners their very best cannon

"and get the very best Chinese craftsmen

"to replicate them exactly...

"..and get them to teach other craftsmen,

"so the one will teach ten and the ten will teach 100

"until all China knows how to make them,

"because if you will fight the foreign devils,

"you will need the best cannon and to be very well-prepared.

"For a war with the foreigners will certainly take place."

Towards the end of the Taiping, in a Second Opium War,

the British and the French had forced more concessions

from the Chinese -

more treaty ports,

eventually over 80 of them.

With their banks and villas, parts of Chinese cities began to look

like corners of Europe now and the infrastructure came with them -

the telegraph and banking, railways and trams.

Swelled by merchants fleeing the Taiping,

Shanghai was launched on its path to become the world's greatest city.

Behind me, the old headquarters of the HSBC -

the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation.

Today, one of the richest banks in the world,

but founded here in China by a British trader in 1865.

So China had begun to open up.

But in that lay a profound threat

to the way China had seen the world for so long.

Remember this is very striking in Asia, the architecture.

It's almost like inserting a completely alien

structural civilisation on Asian territory.

So it has a remarkable impact,

in that sense, on people's psyche.

But in the countryside, it was a very different story.

It is important to emphasis,

actually, vast parts of China is not Shanghai.

This is the part of China that's the dominant part of China.

That is very important in explaining the rise of political forces.

Sparked by drought and famine,

more peasant risings were flaring across the land.

And then in 1895...

LOUD BANG

..China was humiliated in a disastrous war with Japan.

And now the colonial powers gathered like vultures.

The Russians, Japanese and Germans in the north,

the French and British in the south.

And in 1899, came the second great explosion -

the Boxer Rising.

MEN SHOUT, MACHINE GUN RATTLES

The Boxers swept on Beijing with a strange mix of martial arts

and mysticism, calling for the killing of foreigners

and the wiping out of foreign influence.

The court fled the capital

and in the European quarter in Beijing,

the colonials were trapped in a 55-day siege.

A relief army of 20,000 men drawn from the eight foreign powers

marched from the coast.

HE SHOUTS IN HIS OWN LANGUAGE

And they took revenge in a rampage of looting and killing.

The Boxers were crushed mercilessly

and huge financial reparations imposed on China.

The Boxer Rebellion was a horrendous disaster for China

and for the people of Beijing,

who'd never seen looting and massacres and killings

like this for centuries.

To make matters worse,

the foreigners also demanded that this area of Beijing,

the Legation Quarter, should be turned over to them.

They would wall it and administer it themselves.

This was the French post office here, built in 1901.

In central Beijing,

you can still trace the European quarter on the ground.

If you look at the map of Beijing,

you can see what that meant in practice.

This is the Legation Quarter here.

It's, like, a mile long, nearly half a mile wide.

As big as the Forbidden City, it's incredible, isn't it?

And right next to it.

It is another Forbidden City - the Chinese aren't allowed in it.

No wonder Chinese people were outraged.

The indemnity imposed on the Qing government

was the equivalent today of 60 billion.

What the Chinese people felt about it all

can be seen through an incredible source -

the 200-volume diary of an ordinary man in a small town.

His name...Liu Dapeng.

Today, back at his old home,

his family, friends and neighbours have gathered

to celebrate an unlikely local hero.

A Chinese everyman who gave voice to the feelings of the people.

A provincial degree holder who never held office,

a teacher, farmer and mine manager,

Liu was loyal to the emperor

and a pillar of the traditional Confucian morality.

Not the sort to support fanatics,

but as his writings show

he understood the root causes of the Boxer rising.

And for Liu and his neighbours,

the very existence of the empire was now at stake.

He wrote in his diary, "I fear that revolts will break out

"all over the provinces of the empire.

"When the people have no security, they will rise up -

"it's natural and inevitable, but where will it end?"

Revolution was in the air.

And among women, too.

Now recast as a kung fu heroine,

the feminist poet Qiu Jin joined the republican movement in exile

and founded a radical journal for women's voices.

Brilliant and courageous,

she was the tragic star of the failed revolution of 1907.

15th July 1907,

four days before the planned armed uprising

that would overthrow the dynasty,

Qui Jin was executed by beheading

here in the middle of her hometown - Shaoxing.

That monument marks the spot.

She was 31.

And at that moment, the empire itself entered its death throes.

The next year, 1908,

a two-year-old boy came to the Dragon Throne.

And he was the last emperor.

Caught between its Confucian past and a western future,

the empire was doomed.

RHYTHMIC, MARTIAL DRUMMING

MAN SHOUTS ORDERS

On October 10th 1911,

a coalition of the army, bankers and the urban bourgeoisie

declared China a republic.

In early 1912, the boy emperor was forced to abdicate.

MAN SHOUTS ORDERS

It was 2,000 years since the first emperor,

3,000 since the Zhou proclaimed the Mandate of Heaven

and now that vast universe of ritual and symbol was gone.

But what would the Chinese people put in its place?

China's first elected president

was the Hawaiian-educated Sun Yat-sen,

who had led the republican movement in exile

and long dreamed of a free, democratic China.

But from the start, Sun had to deal with the old powers -

the army, the warlords and the foreigners.

And in its brief life, the republic never knew peace.

In the First World War, China joined the Allies

and provided nearly 150,000 labourers on the Western Front.

But at the end of the war, they were in for a shock.

When the Treaty of Versailles was signed,

China's youth were shocked to find that the territory

that had originally been given to Germany as a colony

in the late 19th century up in Shandong Province

wasn't going to be handed back to China.

Instead, it would become part of a Japanese territory

and this was regarded as outrageous.

ANGRY SHOUTING AND CHANTING

On May 4th 1919,

using their new-found rights to freedom of speech,

a huge student demonstration was organised in the capital.

The student protest that hot Sunday here in Beijing

has come to be seen as a powerful symbol

of the Chinese people's struggle for liberation in the 20th century.

There were 3,000 students and they gathered right here

in front of the gates of Peking University,

the old library, the Red Building, as they called it.

They had banners made out of bamboo and cloth

and they wanted the world to know.

They'd even prepared English-language statements,

which they hoped to hand in to the embassies

of the colonial occupying powers.

The Chinese people's struggle was about to open to the world.

The May 4th demonstration here in Tiananmen Square

was a key moment for modern China.

In a culture that gave such respect to the old,

the young had spoken.

And their ideas spread like wildfire.

Writers and journalists now called for

a wholesale renewal of Chinese society and politics.

They wanted to sweep away the old

and create a new culture

based on Western democracy and science.

A key voice was modern China's greatest writer - Lu Xun.

Lu Xun was born in 1881.

So by the time of May 4th Movement came about he was pushing 40,

long past the idealism of youth.

He trained as a doctor.

And although he became a writer,

through his whole life he kept that bedside manner

of a world-weary, ironical but humane physician.

But a pessimist - not one to let hope run away with him

with all the defeats of the time.

And in 1920s China,

after the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles,

that was the voice.

"The republic has failed us," he wrote.

"We've been cheated.

"We were slaves before and now we're ruled by slaves.

"We must renew the spirit of China."

"Hope is like a path in the countryside," he wrote.

"At first there is no path,

"but if enough people walk in the same direction, the path appears."

But which path would China take?

The May 4th Movement had electrified

the political and cultural debate in China,

a flood of ideas from which there would be no going back.

And among those ideas was a Western political philosophy,

a communist philosophy - Marxism.

And the first meeting of a Chinese communist party

was held here in this room, around this table, in July 1921.

There were 12 people present.

Among them the Hunan peasant's son Mao Zedong.

They were attracted by its anti-feudal,

anti-imperialist message

and also by its claim to be scientific.

That it held the key not only to history, but to the future.

The 12 people sitting here were the representatives of just 57 members.

At that point the party had no significance at all.

# When it's night-time in dear old Shanghai

# And I'm dancing, sweetheart, with you... #

Just round the corner, the Jazz Age was in full swing.

China's politics were in chaos,

but the '20s were a dynamic time - for some.

The economy was growing in cities like Shanghai.

A young Briton who came out here in 1919 from Lancashire

after the First World War,

with no jobs at home, joined the police and said,

"It's the best city I've ever seen.

"The most cosmopolitan place in the world

"and in time it will leave every English city 100 years behind."

# In my arms, dear

# Away from harm, dear... #

But westernisation was not just about material life,

it was about China learning to be modern.

These treaty and concession ports like Shanghai and Hong Kong,

with their Western hotels, Western banks

and department stores,

they were pointers to the future for the new Republic of China.

And adverts from the time

show us that people were strongly encouraged

to do what the radicals in the May 4th Movement

and the New Culture Movement had been saying -

"Do away with the old.

"From now on, let's wear Western suits

"with a collar and tie and a fedora."

So all this was a million miles away from the vast rural hinterland

in which most of China's nearly 500 million people lived in the 1920s.

But even there...history was on the move.

In the late '20s, ravaged by floods and famines and armed conflict,

peasants were selling their children,

dying in their thousands of disease and starvation.

And in these desperate times arose a man of destiny -

Mao Zedong.

Mao was born in 1893, the son of a well-off peasant in Hunan.

'He left high school at 25,

'having trained as a primary-school teacher.'

Sensitive.

He was haunted by childhood memories

of the killing of famine-stricken protesters in his home town.

And then he discovered communism.

And then look at this...

These are the early struggles,

the early mobilisation of the peasants.

His voracious reading had first led him to European socialism

and then to violent revolution.

He began as a guerrilla leader in a failed communist rising

in his native Hunan

and then in setting up independent communist enclaves - Soviets -

deep in the countryside.

With that, the nationalist government,

now under Prime Minister Chiang Kai-shek,

decided to wipe out the communists.

Thousands were killed, including Mao's wife and sister.

In 1934, the survivors embarked on what became known as the Long March,

a 6,000-mile trek to northwest China.

Only 8,000, about a tenth of them, survived.

And they made their base at Yan'an.

A nowhere place in a bleak countryside,

it must have seemed at that point that the communist movement in China

had reached a dead end.

But then, in 1937,

the Japanese launched a full-scale invasion of China.

-MAN ON NEWSREEL:

-The Japanese now seek total conquest,

not just another chunk of territory.

A century since Britain first blasted China open,

a generation since the bloodshed of the Boxers,

babies have grown to manhood without a year of peace.

For 25 years, China has lived with warlords, guns and terror.

But now it must drink deeper of the cup of bitterness.

That December, in a six-week reign of terror,

the Japanese army massacred

more than a quarter of a million people in Nanjing.

How old were you when the Japanese invaded China?

SHE REPLIES IN HER OWN LANGUAGE

14? 14 years old, yeah.

And when the Japanese actually attacked the city in December 1937,

what did you see?

Did you hear stories from people escaping?

Out of such horrors a national resistance was born.

Far away in Yan'an, from a defeated guerrilla army,

the communists now found themselves

part of a liberation struggle.

Mao himself had gained power over the party

and emerged as a formidable and ruthless revolutionary.

A United Front was formed,

with the nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek

and the communists under Mao,

fighting the common enemy - the Japanese.

At that time, Mao lived here in the caves outside Yan'an.

He was even visited by Western journalists.

Among those who came to see him then

was the philosopher and social reformer Liang Shuming,

no lover of Marxism or of Western capitalism,

but a Chinese patriot.

Very different men,

Liang the traditional scholar in his long gown, sipping tea

and Mao the son of a Hunan peasant,

laughing, scratching himself,

chain-smoking hand-rolled cigarettes

and knocking back glass after glass of the local white whisky.

Marx and Confucius debating the future of China.

And Liang's portrait of Mao is very attractive.

He says, "He was relaxed and warm and natural.

"Extremely vulgar, but completely unaffected

"and a very sharp mind.

"Head and shoulders above everybody else."

But for all their differences,

they were agreed on the two key problems facing China.

Number one, the rural question,

the terrible poverty of the mass of the population of the country.

And number two, national liberation from the Japanese invasion.

As Mao said to Liang,

"The war has changed everything."

This is a conflict that killed 14 million, possibly more,

civilians and military in China during the war itself.

-14 million?

-14 million.

80-100 million Chinese

may well have become refugees in their own country.

So in terms of changing the direction

of China's politics and society,

the wartime period is immensely important.

When the Japanese surrendered in 1945,

the National Front fell apart.

And the nationalists and the communists

now fought a bitter civil war.

Backed by the West, and especially the US,

the nationalists had the manpower and equipment.

The communists were outgunned.

But after 12 years in Yan'an,

their land reforms had gathered mass support across the countryside,

boosted by propaganda promising a golden age of social justice.

In one year the Red Army swept down the length of China

and after heavy fighting the nationalists fled to Taiwan.

The People's Republic was founded.

On 1st October 1949, in Beijing,

Mao announced the birth of a new China.

MAO SPEAKS IN HIS OWN LANGUAGE

There's the Tiananmen Gate, where Mao Zedong made that famous speech.

It was only 38 years after the fall of the empire.

And after all the sufferings of the Chinese people

through the Japanese war and the Second World War and the civil war,

there was widespread optimism

that there might be a completely fresh, new start.

After all, revolution had been a fact of life in the Chinese story,

almost a natural part of the recurring cycles of Chinese history.

But the surprising suddenness with which, in the end,

the communists were able to take power

only added to the enormous burden that they'd inherited.

Mao was, above all, a revolutionary.

He believed that the new world could be born through destruction

and that loss of life was no object

in achieving the goal of China's socialist utopia.

He forged a repressive state.

Words and thoughts were strictly controlled,

class war was waged.

In early-1950s China, Stalin was a god.

The letters above the arch say,

"The thoughts of Chairman Mao will shine forever."

This is Nanjie village in Hunan,

a tiny pocket of Chairman Mao's socialism

in the great ocean of modern Chinese capitalism.

Today, Nanjie is the last communist collective in China.

It's still run as a workers' cooperative

and here you can get a distant feel of Mao's brave new world.

It was to be based on new values,

doing away with centuries of stifling Confucian tradition.

China was to be organised into collective farms and work brigades.

"Our economy will overtake Britain in a few years," Mao said.

All of it was directed

by the rigid and secretive Chinese Communist Party,

with Stalin's advisers controlling the people's lives

from cradle to grave.

But there were real achievements, especially in public health,

in education and literacy.

There was also a great improvement in the role and status of women.

All of this has helped shape today's China.

MAN SINGS IN HIS OWN LANGUAGE

THEY SING IN THEIR OWN LANGUAGE

Though out of step with the rest of China today,

the mayor still believes in Mao's vision.

But Maoism went against the very grain of Chinese civilisation.

Its economic ideas were calamitous.

The collectivisation of farming massively disrupted society.

Mao responded to the failures with the Great Leap Forward,

a disastrous drive to industrialise the countryside.

That led to the Great Famine.

Between 1959 and 1961,

it's now thought well over 30 million people died.

By the end of the '50s,

the imposition of Maoism on the Chinese people had clearly failed.

And Mao was sidelined as leader of the Party.

But he wouldn't let go.

In 1964, aged 70, he regained control

and launched the Cultural Revolution.

Frustrated by the Chinese people's loyalty to their culture,

Mao urged millions of young people, Red Guards,

to smash old customs, old ideas, Confucian values.

Your name is?

REPLIES IN OWN LANGUAGE

OK, my name is Michael.

Every Chinese family suffered.

The Baos, originally from Tangyue in Anhui,

who we've followed through this story,

were just one.

Loyal village officers in the Ming Dynasty,

philanthropic salt merchants in the Qing,

they now faced terror and abuse.

But also the destruction of their treasured past.

So how many generations here?

-WOMAN:

-Six generations of Ming Dynasty...

Six generations Ming.

Seven generations Qing.

So Mr Bao is 30th

and the little boy is 32nd generation.

During the Taiping Rebellion,

the family had risked their lives

to save this 18th-century painting of their ancestors.

And now they went through it all again.

And as Mr Bao told the tale,

it was as if, once more,

the voice of the Chinese people was speaking.

Their love of their history and attachment to their old culture.

Mao died in 1976 aged 83,

corrupted by power and his messianic personality cult.

Today, he's still a hero for many.

Mao memorabilia are everywhere -

photos, magazines and posters

and, of course, The Little Red Book.

The man who many here still think, for all his mistakes,

made China great again.

It's said that in his last days

he was obsessively reading Sima Guang.

Many lessons for rulers of all times in Chinese history

in that famous historian's work, with its message to the Emperor

that "here's the history of China unfolding before you

"and you will see that, over the epochs,

"there has been chaos and destruction

"and violence and disorder for most of that period.

"And that the periods of good order and harmony

"have been short in the history of China.

"And this tells you the achievement of harmony in government

"is a very difficult thing

"that needs to be very carefully tended once you've got there."

There were those who said, of course,

that had he died in 1956,

his achievements would have been remembered

as one of the great rulers of China.

But on what happened afterwards even the Party admitted,

"Comrade Mao mistook right for wrong and the people for the enemy.

"And therein lies his tragedy."

Mao thought his revolution was unfinished.

But after his death the Party turned its back on Marxism.

For help to rebuild China, his successor, Deng Xiaoping,

went to America.

-REPORTER:

-The eyes of Texas were on Deng Xiaoping today.

We learned some new things about Deng.

He likes astronauts, cowboys and basketball,

and perhaps a new image for communist China's leading man.

For Deng Xiaoping not only went West, but went Western.

Deng's great "opening up" would turn China into a capitalist society

and brought the greatest lifting out of poverty in human history.

And just as in the May 4th Movement in 1919,

new freedoms swiftly beckoned.

-REPORTER:

-For the first time, in huge numbers,

the ordinary men and women of Beijing, the old and the young,

professors and taxi drivers, have joined the student protest.

In 1989, another great demonstration in Tiananmen Square

also called for change.

But the Party feared the loss of its own monopoly on power.

The protesters were brutally crushed,

their protest dropped from history.

Over the next 25 years, China simply grew richer and richer.

If a historian had been trying to predict what China would look like

in the early 21st century,

she would almost certainly have got it entirely wrong.

They would never have guessed that China would be

one of the most thriving capitalist societies

in the history of the world.

Although one that's still under authoritarian rule.

I think China embarked on what I call "the long march for modernity"

since the Opium Wars.

Because its elite

realised it had to change.

It had to catch up with the West, it has to modernise.

So that "march" is still going on.

And that means embracing history, too.

Good and bad.

For to be open about history, after all,

is a foundation of a better present and a better future.

Here in the city of Wuxi,

the Qin family have gathered for their annual reunion,

to celebrate their history,

the incredible durability of the Chinese family

and its place in the story of the nation.

I think it's remarkable that all of us here today

trace our ancestry through this remarkable poet in the Sung Dynasty,

who was born almost 1,000 years ago.

And today, the descendants can be found all over China.

I'm very happy to be here...

Like all Chinese families,

the Qins have weathered the storms of the 20th century.

They've had rightists and leftists, journalists and calligraphers

and even a hero of the Long March,

whose daughters are here today to remember him.

The wounds of the last century are fading now.

The Chinese people, the real heroes and heroines of our story,

are savouring life to the full again.

It's the festival of the Chinese New Year, everybody's favourite holiday,

when all families try to get back together

and the whole country grinds to a halt for two weeks.

SHE SCREAMS AND LAUGHS

It's a time of auspiciousness and fun.

A time for letting go.

And at the heart of it all

are the old Chinese beliefs about good fortune and prosperity...

..the old rituals of cooking and eating together.

In every home, as the saying goes, the four generations under one roof.

Just like the rest of us,

the people of China are concerned about the future,

about the environment, the effects of materialism,

about freedom itself.

But they're united, as always, by their common culture and history,

by the things they've valued for so long.

The story of China is part of the history

of all the peoples of our small planet.

And the next chapter, in many ways,

will be more momentous than any that have gone before.

Here at the Altar of Heaven in Beijing,

just over 100 years ago,

the last emperors of China performed the ancient rituals

to maintain harmony between humanity,

the Earth and the cosmos.

Fitting, in this place, isn't it?

You almost feel as is you're suspended between heaven and Earth.

And now that ancient idea is all the more meaningful and urgent

to China and to the world.

The Chinese government has set its goal over the next 30 years

to become a prosperous and democratic socialist society.

In that, the rest of the world can only wish them well.

For after the 4,000-year epic of Chinese civilisation,

with all its triumphs and tragedies

and its almost boundless invention and creativity,

the world needs a prosperous and peaceful China

like never before.