Philip P. Pan in his examination of the struggle for the soul of China points out that the film maker Hu Jie who began as a cameraman and producer for an official government news agency began to work on the side and produce documentary films that shed a critical light on Chinese society until he was fired by a bureaucrat with pressure from higher up. He would then turn to documenting the life and death of Lin Zhao, a young female artist who was imprisoned and killed during the Cultural Revolution yet left a secret legacy written in her own blood!
During the time of Mao the Great Teacher, the Great Leader, the Great Helmsman led a revolution that in Pan's words..." resulted in "...a complex tapestry of truth and lies intended to bury unpleasant memories and obscure inconvenient facts." Mao's death in 1976 would usher in instances when lessons in market economics, Western political thought, and even Freudian psychology would attempt to wiggle their way into the consciousness of the intelligencia and military's upper echelons.
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