Communism promised a world without class, without exploitation and without want, yet wherever it was tried, the result was tyranny. This China Uncensored episode traces the brief history of that promise and its consequences, from the writings of Marx and Engels in the nineteenth century to the revolutions in Russia and China, and to the regimes that claimed to rule in the name of the people while crushing dissent, seizing property and controlling every part of life.
The film looks at the pattern that repeated itself from country to country: the seizure of power in the name of liberation, the creation of a one-party state, the use of secret police and labour camps, and the famines and purges that followed attempts to remake society by force. It examines the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin, Mao’s China and the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and argues that tyranny was not an accident of bad leaders but a consequence of an ideology that gave the state unlimited power.
This episode matters because the history of communism is still debated today, and its promises are still made by new movements. China Uncensored offers a clear account of what happened when those promises were put into practice, and why the record should be remembered.