In contrast to his previous works of carefully concealing the criticism of not-so-favorite part of Chinese tradition, this film took a completely different turn: although generally shaped by the social criticism, namely, targeting Cultural Revolution, there is a praise of the good part of traditional Chinese culture, such as the dedication for the next generation, the endurance, the emphasis on education.

King of the Children (Haizi Wang) may have a General Audiences rating; however it is far from a general audiences film (especially Western audiences). The film is too austere, too realistic and too poignant to be appreciated by the vast majority of Western viewers. They appreciate teaching films like Goodbye, Mr Chips (both the classic original with Robert Donat and the passable remake with Peter O'Toole),Conrack, To Sir With Love, Stand and Eat Liver (I mean Deliver),Dead Poet's Society, and even Mr. Holland's Opus. These are all fine films in their own right, and I may have left off one or two of the viewers' favorites, but this films annihilates them for sheer raw power.

Set in a very poor countryside village in the early 1970s, the settings of the other teacher films on the list are luxurious in comparison. The ghetto of Los Angeles is a luxury resort compared to these villages and the struggle of these Chinese peasants to merely survive every day with food and clothing. We do not see communism at all in any of these scenes; merely poverty and people pulling together to survive in a basic socialistic approach. There is no other way to survive these conditions. Chen Kaige is one of the two greatest directors in Chinese cinema (the other being Zhang Yimou). and it shows in this stunningly beautiful, and at the same time, ugly, film. The movie requires a great deal of patience to watch (I viewed it with no subtitles and had no problem understanding every scene; the mark of a great filmmaker). Few Americans will have the patience to endure the film, nor the intelligence to appreciate it, but some will. It is a trip worth taking.

Haizi Wang focuses on a group of "sent down youth": teenagers exiled to the countryside in the far SW province of Yunnan during the cultural revolution. The protagonist accepts a job as a teacher in an impoverished school and begins teaching his rural pupils in the traditional manner--the instructor transcribes the text of the lesson on the chalkboard, the students recite the lesson aloud, and copy the text in their notebooks. His most ambitious student takes on the task of transcribing the entire dictionary.

The subject of this film is the propagation of Chinese cultural values through traditional style of education. This theme reflects a view prevalent among Chen Kaige's generation who experienced the CR first hand: even though the Cultural Revolution set out to do away with the trappings of China's "feudal" cultural heritage, the language and rhetoric of the participants was infused with deep rooted, "traditional feudal values." Thus the CR only succeeded in replicating the same values it sought to eradicate.

The cinematography and narrative structure of the Haizi Wang underscore the director's concern with breaking from blind imitation of conventional filmmaking.

**Contrast with other films about sent down youth: Sacrificed Youth and Xie Jin's The Herdsman.