Morning Sun is a website containing short essays, photos, film footage, and music from the Cultural Revolution, the ten years of mayhem that brought the world excellent slogans such as “Rebellion is just! Revolution is not a crime!”
The website describes the movements and campaigns of the time, and what is was like to live through it. The writing is dry, the design is spare and it’s very easy to find your way about for a site with such a lot of content.
The site is the web companion to a documentary film of the same name, written, directed and produced by Carma Hinton, Geremie Barme and Richard Gordon. Hinton was born in Beijing to left-wing American parents and grew up as a native Chinese speaker during the Cultural Revolution. Barme is an Australian scholar of China who first came here around the time of the Anti-Confucious and Lin Biao campaign. Barme was the first Sinologist to write eloquently about Chinese pop culture and is often credited with bringing Sinology out of a hoary drawer in the academic cabinet that it used to share with subjects like Latin and Sanskrit. Some of Barme’s books are available here.
Morning Sun is here. If you’re in China and finding it difficult to access the website, try this.