China Triumph and Turmoil

Season 1

How does something stay together when the laws of history tell us it should fall apart? The country's new billionaires, survivors of Chairman Mao's regime and young nationalists talk to Professor Niall Ferguson about living in a Communist system with a capitalist economy. It's held a fifth of humanity together for 2,000 years - will it last another 2,000?

Where to Watch Season 1

3 Episodes

Emperors
E1
EmperorsNiall Ferguson shows how the vast apparatus of the Chinese state has always been called on to subjugate individual freedom to the higher goal of unity. Ferguson also examines how, on the other hand, centralised control produces tensions that threaten to destroy the country.
Maostalgia
E2
MaostalgiaNiall Ferguson asks how China manages to live under a Communist system of government but with a thriving capitalist economy. The succession of revolutions orchestrated by Mao Zedong killed more people than Hitler and Stalin combined. And yet this hard-line communist and murderer of businessmen is revered in China today as the founder of a modern-day capitalist superpower. Why? To answer this question Niall travels from Beijing to Mao's birthplace at Shaoshan to the new supercity of Chongqing and to the rural backwaters of Anhui to track down survivors of the madness of Chairman Mao, newly minted billionaires and the Mao worshippers who believe tomorrow belongs to them. He finds the way China is governed is eerily similar to the way it was under the First Emperor. All the power lies in the hands of nine men with expressionless faces and what looks like the same hair dye - as unelected and as powerful as Emperor Qin.
Superpower
E3
SuperpowerNiall Ferguson asks what China's growing global presence and aggressive nationalism mean to all of us. China's supercharged economic growth signals a seismic shift in political power from West to East. We are increasingly dependent on China's money to bail out our own fragile economies.