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China: The Making of a Nation

Name: China: The Making of a Nation
Genre: Documentary
Released: 2026-02-10
Rating: 8.0
Cast: Sarah-Jane Sauvegrain, Thierry Debrune, Marie-Ève Dufresne, Daniel Lafourcade, Jean-François Pagès

Documentary

★ 8.0/10 TMDB Premiered 2026-02-10 1 season 2 eps

China: The Making of a Nation is the story of the painful transformation of the vast Qing Empire into the Chinese nation after the 1911 revolution. Spanning more than a century up to the Xi Jinping era, the story pits the two pivotal leaders of this transformation against each other: Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Republic of China for 47 years, and Mao Zedong, who rose from ‘red bandit’ to master of the mainland in 1949. Sworn enemies, they fought a merciless battle: first military, then diplomatic, and finally, beyond their deaths, in the conflicting memories of the Taiwanese and the Chinese of the People's Republic. Beyond their fierce hatred, the two tyrants also had much in common: a certain vision of Chinese territory and the greatness of China, the desire to regain the country's sovereignty and the quest for a Chinese identity in a nation that also includes Tibetans, Uighurs, Mongols... and a certain ability to rewrite history.

Last Episode Aired 2026-02-10

S1E2 — The Red Sun

In 1945, at the end of the Second World War, the “Blue Sun” of nationalist China seemed to be at its peak: it had reclaimed foreign concessions and become one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. Yet behind this façade, corruption and brutality were rife. The Republic eventually fell in the civil war to Mao Zedong’s “Red Sun.” Defeated, Chiang Kai-shek retreated to Taiwan, while Mao began reshaping the Chinese state according to his vision.

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