Curtailing dissent
"You love your motherland. But does your motherland love you?" the distraught young woman asks her father, as she helplessly watches him being victimized by fanatical Red Guards. That snippet of mildly unpatriotic dialogue comes at the conclusion of Unrequited Love, a new cinematic potboiler about the Cultural Revolution that brought turmoil to China in the late 1960s. The heroine's plaintive appeal would not ordinarily seem to be politically explosive, but last week it was singled out for official opprobrium in a stepped-up curtailment of political and artistic freedom in China. In a more threatening manifestation of Peking's...
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