Frontline : China in the Red (2003)

Genres - News [TV]  |   Run Time - 120 min.  |   Countries - United States  |  
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Synopsis

An exploration of what narrator Will Lyman calls "the human cost" of the China's economic reforms, following 10 Chinese citizens between 1998 and 2001. Overall, the "cost" is 35-million lost jobs since the 1998 announcement that state-owned industries must become profitable by 2001. None of the workers at state-owned factories (one in Beijing, the other in Shenyang) profiled by producer Sue Williams were laid off, but none are doing as well as the entrepreneurs Williams filmed. Says one, a woman who makes and sells noodles in her rural village (and is its richest resident): "Now you can do anything, as long as you make money."