- In the 1830s the Chinese empire had had been in existence for over 2000 years.

It had faced many threats from inside and out, but the old values of Chinese civilization still ruled society.

Now though, the Europeans were growing in influence and here In Canton new Western ideas 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.

(dramatic music) 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.

(screaming) (dramatic music) (gentle music) In 1841 here in the Pearl River, the British blasted the Chinese to defeat in the first opium war.

(gentle music) The Chinese coastal forts were useless.

Their junks, no match for Iron Clads and rocket launchers.

(gentle music) The British forced the Chinese to give them trading concessions, and treaty ports like Shanghai and Canton.

(gentle music) And here they began to import European civilization, building European style warehouses, villas, 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.

(upbeat music) 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.

(upbeat music) 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.

(upbeat music) 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?

(speaking in foreign language) - Before the rising.

- [Woman] Yeah.

- [Michael] Yeah.

Look at this, fantastic.

Isn't that wonderful?

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

(speaking in foreign language) - [Announcer] He came here because Guangxi is very remote.

At first he got a job as a teacher in the village, but after a while he began to teach the people about God.

(speaking in foreign language) (motorcycle engine humming) - Hong and his disciples started to organize village meetings.

Here in Old Wood Village they enthused the local people with their revolutionary ideas.

Ah Hello!

Nihau.

So we've come to look for the Taiping.

(laughs) (speaking in foreign language) - [Announcer] When Feng wasn't working, he would go over there to teach us about the Taiping religion, and preach revolution.

(speaking in foreign language) - [Announcer] We the Zeng family, we had people who actually took part in that revolution.

(speaking in foreign language) - Hong had identified the Christian god with the high god of ancient China and he wanted to create heavens 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 mesmerized 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, their landlords and the rich.

(dramatic music) 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.

(dramatic music) 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.

(dramatic music) This is the site of the school where Feng taught and spread the Taiping ideology.

You could say this is where the great rebellion started.

The school was in this site then, is that right?

- The school started here and moved somewhere there and then 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.

(speaking in foreign language) - [Announcer] Our relative down in Old Wood village sent Feng here to us to be a teacher.

But he was committed to revolution.

(speaking in foreign language) The insurrection started from here.

(speaking in foreign language) - It's hard to imagine isn't it?

Such earth shaking historical events beginning in such out of the way places.

(serious music) But by 1849, these little villages under Thistle mountain were just humming with omens and visions and prophecies.

(serious music) Jesus was making regular descents down to earth to bring Hong messages from heaven in his dreams.

(serious music) Angels in golden robes were giving succor 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.

(serious music) 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.

(explosions) 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.

(speaking in foreign language) - [Announcer] They were poor farmers, miners and laborers, starving and desperate.

(speaking in foreign language) (frenzied screaming) They had nothing to lose, so they followed Hong all the way to Nanjing.

And there Hong, who called himself the Son of God, established the Taiping Kingdom.

(dramatic music) - On March 19th 1853, Nanjing fell and Hong was enthroned as ruler of God's heavenly kingdom in his new Jerusalem.

(dramatic music) 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 wood block 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.

(upbeat music) 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.

(upbeat music) In the back streets 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, and Daoist temples, Buddhist and Confucian shrines wherever they'd gone.

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

Over there the five story wooden watchtower.

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.

(dramatic music) 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 jeopardize, so they lent the Chinese government advisors and the latest weaponry to help crush the rebels.

(dramatic music) 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.

(speaking in foreign language) - [Announcer] When the Qing army marched on Nanjing Hong announced that God himself would save them.

But inside the besieged city the people began to starve.

Eventually, Hong fell ill and died.

(speaking in foreign language) When the Qing army finally smashed into Nanjing, they killed all the remaining Taiping leaders.

They even took Hong's body from the grave and burned it, (growling) mixed his ashes with gunpowder and blasted them from a canon so he was completely eliminated from the world.

(speaking in foreign language) (forlorn music) - By the end, over 20 million people died of famine, disease and fighting.

It was the worst war of the 19th century.

The Qing thought they had weathered the storm.

The war-shattered city of Nanjing was rebuilt.

And at that point, the Qing could still see themselves as the center of the world.

But the Taiping rebellion was a dire warning.

(forlorn music) 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 10, and the 10 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."

(dramatic music) Even before the end of the Taiping in a second Opium War the British and the French had forced more concessions from the Chinese government, more treaty ports and towns.

Eventually there'd be more than 80 of them.

(dramatic music) 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 Hong Kong and Shanghai banking cooperation, 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.

(clock bells ringing) - Remember this is very striking in Asia right?

The architecture, it's almost like inserting a completely alien structure or civilization on an Asian territory.

So it has remarkable impact in that sense on people's psyche.

(dramatic music) - [Michael] But in the countryside, where the majority of China's 400 million people lived, it was a very different story.

- It is important to emphasize 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, China was humiliated in a disastrous war with Japan.

Now the colonial powers gathered like vultures.

The Russians, Japanese and Germans in the north.

The French and British in the south.

The US, too, was involved now.

And in 1899 came the second great explosion, the Boxer Rising.

(screaming and guns shooting) 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, including US Marines sent by President McKinley.

(screaming in foreign language) (canons exploding) And They took revenge, in a rampage of looting and killing.

(militant music) 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.

(sobering music) In central Beijing you can still trace the European quarter on the ground.

You look at the map of Beijing and 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.

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 dollars.

(dramatic music) (upbeat music) What the Chinese people felt about it all can be seen through an incredible source.

The two hundred volume diary of an ordinary man in a small town.

His name, Liu Dapeng.

(speaking in foreign language) Today back at his old home, his family, friends, and neighbors have gathered to celebrate an unlikely local hero.

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

(speaking in foreign language) - [Announcer] Liu Dapeng was an ordinary man from a small town.

But you can learn a lot about society from his writing.

He was a thoughtful and concerned contemporary witness.

(speaking in foreign language) - [Michael] 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.

- [Announcer] The indemnity is huge, people can hardly survive.

Security brings peace, but without it the people will rise up.

Foreigners and Christians are abusing the people.

- And now Liu and his neighbours could see that the very existence of the empire was 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?

(dramatic music) Revolution was in the air.

(dramatic music) 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, Qiu Jin was executed by beheading here in the middle of her hometown Shaoxing.

That monument marks the spot.

(frenzied music - [Announcer] She was a revolutionary.

She promoted new ideas.

She died for the nation.

She said, "Why can't women he heroes too?"

(frenzied music) - She was 31, and at that moment the empire itself entered its death throes.

(ominous music) The next year, 1908, a two-year-old boy came to the dragon throne.

And he was the last emperor.

(dramatic music) Caught between its Confucian past and the western future, the empire was doomed.

(dramatic music) (speaking in foreign language) 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.

(speaking in foreign language) It was 2000 years since the first emperor, 3000 since the Zhou proclaimed the Mandate of Heaven.

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

(dramatic drums beating) 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.

Inspired by Abraham Lincoln, his dream was a democratic China with government of the people, by the people, for the people.

(speaking in foreign language) - [Announcer] Sun Yat-sen's revolution overthrew the Qing dynasty.

The emperors thought that all of China belonged to them.

(speaking in foreign language) But Sun Yat-Sen thought that China should belong to the people.

(speaking in foreign language) You see it's the other way round.

(speaking in foreign language) - [Michael] 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.

(canons firing) In the first World War China joined the allies, and provided nearly 150,000 laborers on the Western front.

(canons firing) But at the end of the war they were in for a huge 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.

(crowd shouting) - On May 4th, 1919 using their new found rights to freedom of speech, a huge student demonstration was organized in the capital.

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.

(crowd chanting) 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'd hoped to hand in to the embassies of the colonial occupying powers.

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

(dramatic music) The May 4th protest here in Tiananmen Square was the forerunner of later demonstrations, a key moment for modern China.

In a culture that gave such respect to the old, the young had spoken.

(dramatic music) Writers and journalists now called for a wholesale renewal of Chinese culture and politics.

They wanted to sweep away the old and create a new society based on western democracy and modern science.

Leading voice was modern China's most famous writer Lu Xun.

Lu Xun was born in 1881, so by the time the May 4th movement came about, he was pushing 40. long passed the idealism of youth.

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.

In 1920s China, after the humiliation of the treaty of Versailles, that was the voice.

(speaking in foreign language) - [Announcer] A Madman's diary by Lu Xun was a real call to arms during the May 4th Revolution.

In the book, he wrote that the old culture was literally eating the people.

(speaking in foreign language) - [Michael] 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.

(speaking in foreign language) - [Announcer] Lu Xun's whole life was dedicated to the Chinese people.

He understood their sufferings and spoke for them.

His writing informed the whole nation.

That's why he's so admired, even today, by the Chinese people.

(speaking in foreign language) - 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.

(gentle music) 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.

(gentle music) 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.

(snappy music) ♪ High time in deal old Shanghai ♪ And I'm dancing ♪ Sweetheart, with you Just round the corner, the jazz age was in full swing.

♪ Dear old Shanghai China's politics were in chaos, but the 20s were a dynamic time, for some.

The economy was growing in cities like Shanghai.

Young Briton came out here in 1919 from Lancashire after the first World War, no jobs at home, joined the police.

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 westernization 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, 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.

(dramatic music) In the late 20s, ravaged by floods and famines and armed conflict, peasants were dying in their thousands of disease and starvation, and in these desperate times arose a man of destiny.

Few men in history are still so controversial, few so adored and so reviled.

Mao Zedong.

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

He left high school at 25 having trained as a primary school teacher.

He was haunted by childhood memories of the killing of famine stricken protesters in his hometown.

And then he discovered communism.

And then look at this, these are the early struggles, the early mobilization 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.

(gentle music) 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 6000-mile trek to northwest China.

Only 8000, 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.

- [Announcer] The Japanese now seek total conquest, not just another chunk of territory.

(explosions) 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 at 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 Japanese invaded China?

(speaking in foreign language) - 14, 14 years old, yeah.

(speaking in foreign language) And when the Japanese actually attacked the city in December 1937, what did you see?

Did you hear stories from people escaping?

(speaking in foreign language) - [Announcer] A group of us were caught by 20 Japanese soldiers.

One by one, each solder took a woman.

(speaking in foreign language) Finally, there were just two of us.

(speaking in foreign language) Both my grandmothers begged them to spare me, but the other girl, was not spared.

(speaking in foreign language) Seven soldiers raped her.

She could not get up, then they stabbed her.

I saw everything with my own eyes.

Afterwards my grandmothers and I ran away and hid.

The other young girl died.

That is how I escaped my first capture.

- [Michael] 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 now 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.

(suspenseful music) (speaking in foreign language) - [Announcer] Chinese people really adore this place.

The anti-Japanese war and the liberation of the whole country was planned from Yan'an.

- 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 whiskey, 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."

(canon exploding) - This is a conflict that killed 14 million possibly more, civilians and military in China during the war itself.

- [Michael] 14 Million?

- 14 Million.

80 to 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.

(dramatic music) - When the Japanese surrendered in 1945, the national front fell apart.

The nationalists and the communists now fought a bitter civil war.

(dramatic music) 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.

(dramatic music) And so here in Beijing on the first October 1949, Mao announced the birth of a new China.

(speaking in foreign language) (upbeat music) There's 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 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 communist were able to take power only added to the enormous burden that they'd inherited.

(dramatic music) Mao's whole life had led to this moment, for he 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, persecuting state, in which words and thoughts were strictly controlled, and class war was waged.

It's hard to believe now, but it early 1950s China, Stalin was still a god.

(dramatic music) 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.

(machines whirring) 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 based on new values, doing away with centuries of stifling Confucian tradition, that Chinese people were to be reorganized into collective farms and work brigades.

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

And all of it was directed by the rigid and secretive mind of the Communist Party, ruthlessly crushing decent.

Needlessly imposing a one child policy, which has left a damaging mark on Chinese society 'till today.

But there were real achievements especially in public health, education and social housing.

And there was a great improvement in the role and status of women.

(speaking in foreign language) - [Announcer] Life here is great.

Food and housing are free.

We can go to the supermarket and get anything.

(speaking in foreign language) (singing in foreign language) - [Michael] And though completely out of step with the rest of China today, the mayor of Nanje still believes in Mao's socialist vision.

(speaking in foreign language) - [Announcer] We communists have vowed to devote our lives to communism.

We have given our word, we have to fight for it.

(singing in foreign language) - [Michael] But Maoism went against the very grain of Chinese civilization.

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 industrialize the countryside.

That led to the Great Famine.

Between 1959 and 1961, it's now thought well over 30 million people died.

(ominous music) (speaking in foreign language) By the end of the 50s, the imposition of communism on the Chinese people had clearly failed.

And now Mao was sidelined as leader of the Party.

But he wouldn't let go.

And in 1964, aged 70 he regained control and launched the Cultural Revolution.

Frustrated by the Chinese people's continuing loyalty to their traditions, Mao urged millions of young people, Red Guards, to smash the old customs, old ideas and Confucian values, forcing the people to wreck their own culture.

(speaking in foreign language) Your name is-- - Yuo Ja'a.

- Yuo Ja'a.

Okay, my name is Michael.

Every Chinese family suffered.

The Bao's 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, 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.

(speaking in foreign language) - [Announcer] In 1966 the cultural revolution broke out in China.

The Red Guards were searching the houses of the well-educated for any cultural artifacts.

My Grandmother and I knew they would come for us the following day.

- [Michael] And as Mr. Bao told the tale, it was as if the voice of the Chinese people was speaking once more, with their sense of family, and their deep attachment to their culture and their ancestors.

- [Announcer] So the night before, at dusk, we dug a hole in the vegetable patch and buried the painting in it.

We covered it with grass, very carefully.

The next day, the Red Guards came and searched our house.

To distract them, we carried out large bundles of calligraphy and other art works, which they made us burn in front of them.

We lost so much, but the diversion worked and we saved this painting.

(speaking in foreign language) (forlorn music) - Mao died in 1976 aged 83.

Corrupted by power and his messianic personality cult.

(forlorn music) Today he's still a hero for many, Mao memorabilia are everywhere.

Photos, magazines and posters and of course, the little Red Book.

(forlorn music) 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 for all times in Chinese history.

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 the periods of good order and harmony have been short in the history of China.

This tells you the achievement of harmony in government is a very difficult thing there needs to be very carefully tendered once you've got there.

(forlorn music) 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".

(upbeat music) Mao thought his revolution was unfinished, but he left China bruised and battered.

And in what followed, America Would play a special part.

(upbeat music) Before Mao's death president Nixon had gone to Beijing, breaking the ice of the cold war.

And then with Mao gone, China turned its back on Marxism.

And for help to rebuild China, his successor Deng Xiaoping went to the states.

- [Newscaster] The eyes of Texas were on Deng Xiaoping today.

- [Newscaster] 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.

- [Michael] Deng's great opening up would turn China into a capitalist society, and brought the greatest lifting out of poverty in human history.

Just as in The May 4th movement in 1919, new freedoms swiftly beckoned.

- [Newscaster] 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 protests.

- [Michael] 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.

(dramatic music) 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 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 under authoritarian rule.

(dramatic music) - I think China embarked on what I call the long march for modernity since the opium wars.

Because its elite realized it had to change.

It had to catch up with the west, it has to modernize.

So that march is still going on.

- [Michael] 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 1000 years ago.

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

I'm very happy-- - [Michael] 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.

(speaking in foreign language) - [Announcer] The history of the Qin family mirrors the history of the nation.

Over 900 years we've seen so many dynasties.

(laughing) - [Michael] The wounds of the last century are fading now.

The Chinese people, the real heroes and heroines of our story, are savoring life to the full again.

(gentle music) The Chinese government has set its goal over the next 30 years to become a prosperous and democratic socialist society.

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

For after the 4,000 year epic of Chinese civilization, with all its triumphs and tragedies and its almost boundless invention and creativity, the world needs a prosperous and peaceful China like never before.

(gentle music) It's the festival of the Chinese New Year.

(happy shouting) It's a time of auspiciousness and fun.

A time for letting go.

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

(fireworks exploding) 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 are united as always by the things they've valued for so long, the family, and the ancestors, their common culture and the millennia long epic of Chinese civilization.

(fireworks exploding)