Red Chinese Battle Plan
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| Duration Language English | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Release date 1967 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Red Chinese Battle Plan is a 28-minute black-and-white propaganda short produced by the United States Department of Defense in 1967. Presented as a documentary film on Chinese history to military servicemen, the propaganda short describes the People's Republic of China as plotting to "conquer and enslave" the world.
Overview
Produced five years before the beginning of the United States' rapproachment with Mao Zedong in 1972, Red Chinese Battle Plan was made during the Vietnam War under the Lyndon Johnson administration. Despite the widening rift between the China and the Soviet Union, both powers supported the Vietnamese communists during the Indochina conflict, while the Western Bloc cultivated a myth of Chinese expansionism throughout the decade.
Presented as a documentary on Chinese history, the film mixed Cold War-era anti-communist rhetoric with earlier Western Yellow Peril rhetoric into one, portraying China as seeking to gain control of Africa and Latin America before moving on to capture the United States.
The film traces the political philosophy of Mao Zedong to the time of the building of the Great Wall, a period described in the film as an era of "slave labor and thought control." The film's anonymous narrator accuses the People's Republic of China of trying to "conquer and enslave" the planet.