Hibiscus Town

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Recommended: The Chinese cultural revolution as history

“Hibiscus Town” is a 1986 movie which depicts the constantly changing social structure of peasant life in the period leading up to and during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The film looks at peasant life in a small town in China, Hibiscus Town, which acts as a microcosm of China where we are able to observe how the momentum of the Cultural Revolution moved to redefine and transform class boundaries. “Hibiscus Town” concerns itself with the life of Hu Yuyin, the film's protagonist, and how her new label as a class enemy dramatically changes her circumstances.

The film begins by introducing us to Yuyin and her husband Guigui as peasants whose hard work and long hours making bean curd have allowed them to accrue modest financial success within their town. However, their success coincides with the arrival of a work team that has been assigned to assess the inequalities of Hibiscus Town, which decides that Yuyin and Guigui are guilty of being rich peasants. This newly-prescribed label as “rich peasant” severely affects Yuyin and Guigui's status in their community, and they are subjected to sudden scrutiny and humiliation. Guigui's eventual suicide leaves Yuyin alone to deal with her newly-reduced position in society, and the rest of the story follows her as she adapts to her new role as a “bad element” in society. At the same time, the film also surveys how inhabitants of the town are affected by the ensuing power struggles and conflict that occur with the onset of the Cultural Revolution.

“Hibiscus Town” begins in 1964, two years before the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 and shortly after the end of the Great Leap Forward, which lasted during the three years from 1958 to 1960. The Great Leap Forward was a program of ma...

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...ganda responsibilities, and also supporting Yuyin in her quest for financial success. New movements are able to legitimize their actions and rise to power by placing local leadership in a negative light, which is exactly what the work-team in the film does. Interestingly, the work-team leadership is later similarly deposed during the Cultural Revolution by poor peasants and Red Guard, which further underlines the tendency of new movements to purge existing leadership in order to achieve political success.

“Hibiscus Town” is a testament to the volatile circumstances peasants in rural China faced during the years leading up to and during the Cultural Revolution under Chairman Mao's direction. It sheds light on some of the challenges China faced as a freshly communist society, and shows the effects of the radical political campaigns on relatively innocuous citizens.

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