The World About Us

The Cultural Revolution and that little red book of thoughts are as near as most of us can get to China these days, for now more than ever it is a difficult country to visit. It took Rene Burri, who is Swiss, six years to get permission to film there. The result is a programme that allows us for the first time in many years to see the real face of a China that is in many ways surprisingly unchanged-and more real; to see the Chinese as people, as individual as any, and not just as a mass of yelling robots controlled by a master switch.

Behind the facade, behind the banners and political slogans of the Public Image, are the faces of 700 million people, the Chinese. In city and village, knee-deep in the paddy fields of the South, galloping at full tilt across the Mongolian Steppes, they continue in spite of the changes that have taken place to lead their own very personal lives, clinging with a stubborn tenacity to a code of private loyalties and traditions that have withstood 4,000 years of dynastic changes and upheaval.