China in Crisis

First-person account of time spent in China. The author was one of the first foreign students admitted to the University of Beijing. This is an absorbing documentary of life in the early 1960's, on the street, in a train, at a holiday celebration. What emerges is the shocking contrast between party promises and propaganda and the rigors of revolutionary life. China in Crisis is also a gallery of informal, unretouched portraits. There is the professor who is befriended by a man wanting only to poach from the university fish pond; the doctor vilified by a government poster campaign; the distressed student at a mass rally for Mao Tse-tung who never catches sight of him; the fashion-crazy teenagers, children of high-ranking officials, who listen to worn-out American jazz records and engage in black-market deals for kicks.