Hai shang chuan qi (2010) 70% 1★

– A very famous European director, Antonioni, was coming to China to make a film about the country. I heard that he'd been invited by Premier Zhou Enlai, so it was up to us to meet all his needs. So on the second day of filming we were shooting on Nanjing Road, it struck me that he was filming a lot of bad things, things that reflected our backwardness. It seemed totally unfair. When it kept happening, I made a protest. I said, „If you keep on like this, I'll have to stop you.” He said, „Everything I've seen is very good! What do you think is not good?” He thought everything was fine. The way I saw it, these things were far from fine. „We have very good things, but you just shoot such backward stuff.” Our standards were so different. Two years later, out of the blue…our work unit military representative arrested me. He took me from my home to the TV station. Then he spelled it out. Antonioni's movie, „China”, had been seen by the leaders of the Cultural Revolution, Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and so on. They had watched the film and officially declared it to be an anti-China, anti Communist, and anti-people poisonous weed. I later heard that the Gang of Four were using the issue as a pretext to attack Premier Zhou. I went through countless interrogations and confessions, even public criticism. Back then, we came here to attend a criticism meeting. We went to all the places where he'd filmed, such as Shanghai Oil Refinery. And everywhere we went, we were criticized and denounced. I was called a traitor, a spy, a counter-revolutionary, and so on. At that time, I was just 30 years old. How could I be that politically attuned? Even now I have no clear idea of what exactly Antonioni had filmed. I've never seen the film. To this day, I don't know exactly what's in it.

– Then, in 1959, I attended the World Youth Festival. That was held in Vienna. We stopped traffic on the streets of Vienna. They were excited at seeing Chinese. They hadn't seen Chinese people before. Chinese people looked lovely to them. They expected us to look like the photos in their museums, with pigtails and tiny bound feet. We looked nothing like that. They felt they had seen real Chinese. All Vienna was excited. They gave us a big thumbs-up. „China! China! Hurrah!” Everyone gave us a thumbs-up. At that moment, I felt very proud to be Chinese.