Film and the Public Sphere

The public health miracle that the socialist government has apparently delivered since 1949, extraordinarily rapid increases in life expectancy, reduced infant and maternal mortality and reductions in poverty that the WHO can only dream of has divided commentators. While any consequentialist has to take heed, others legitimately ask, at what cost? Improvements in public health were a key objective of the Communist revolution in China, and film is an important way of understanding the aims and outcomes of the universal, comprehensive, and institutionalised health care that it promised.