China Before China

In the heart of Beijing lies the largest palace in the world, The Forbidden City. For five hundred years, it served as the home of the almighty Emperors of China along with their wives, concubines, and entourages of tens of thousands of eunuchs and civil servants. But the Forbidden City is more than an imperial residence; it is the center of the universe, a unique complex of structures revealing a hierarchy of power both imperial and divine.

China's First Emperor was a documentary aired on The History Channel on 2008. It tells the story of Qin Shi Huang's career as a military leader and ruthless ruler and how he unified China during the Qin Dynasty. He is played by Xu Peng Kai.

After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Mao Tsetung established a system of labor camps for systematic repression, known as Laogai, an abbreviation for "Reform Through Labor". In such camps, forced labor and physical and mental torture were used to bring about a so-called mental reform, re-education in the spirit of the Chinese Communist Party. Millions of Chinese were affected. Many were executed. In hundreds of camps, the Party took advantage of the prisoners' free labor to build the economy. Self-criticism and denunciation were often the only way to escape martyrdom. Successive waves of purges culminated in the Cultural Revolution, which saw massive human rights abuses, political assassinations, massacres, and exiles in remote parts of the country. Using unreleased archive footage, the documentary tells the story of the invention, development and improvement of China's totalitarian system of surveillance and repression up to the present day, never told before.

This program reveals the unorthodox life of Puyi, the last Emperor of China, through the use of rare footage from the period. Puyi's story, set against the immense luxury of the Chinese nobility, the decadent 1930s in Tianjin, the upheaval of World War II, the bleakness of prison, plus the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, reflects the turbulent history of China and its people during the early and middle 20th Century.