To Live

The movie To Live was about an ordinary man in China, living with his family. The movie was during the time where Mao, the head of the Communist party, was in power. The movie begins in the 1940’s. Fugui and Jiazhen, the ordinary, married Chinese couple, lose all their money, get separated, reunite, raise two children together, later on they bury two children, and care for a grandchild. They also survive a civil war (Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward, and Cultural Revolution). 

When the couple’s daughter got married to a factory worker, the newly wed couple and her parents took a photo in front of a wall with Mao Zedong’s face painted on it. In 1966, Mao launched a ‘super-campaign’ against the capitalists and the reactionaries. The campaign was known as The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The four of them also held The Little Red Book — which had quotations from Mao Zedong in it — placing it near their heart. 

When the couple’s daughter died in childbirth, it was because there were no doctors present in the hospital. This was because during the Cultural Revolution, the capitalists and reactionaries were arrested — in this case it was the educated and trained doctors — which left the unexperienced nurses in the hospital to deal with the Fugui and Jiazhen’s dying daughter.