From 1949 until the end of the Cultural Revolution in the late seventies, documentary filmmaking in the People's Republic of China was mostly under absolute state control in the service of socialist ideology, as the country's social life during this period was largely equalised with state-led political life. During the Cultural Revolution, the ideological demands made on artistic and media productions became so strict that all publicly exhibited documentaries needed to pass the direct censorship of state leaders. For example, in depicting a state official, the camera was only allowed to move toward and not away from him. A dolly-out or zoom-out shot in such a scenario would be considered a wicked attack on the leader, implying his distance and isolation from the people. Photographic evidence of this kind of documentary alignment of state ideology and the public's reception can be located in the published album of Li Zhensheng, a journalist who took and secretly preserved photographs of the Cultural Revolution. Two of these were taken during the screening of a newsreel documentary, framing an avid audience diagonally in a medium shot, who are applauding in response to the screened image: a waving Chairman Mao accompanied by his political coterie, including the then Defence Minister Lin Biao. According to the caption, this screening took place on 13 September 1966 in Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang Province. The audience was made up of students, obviously Red Guards, and they shouted ‘Long Live Chairman Mao’ each time Mao's image appeared on the screen. Exemplified by the direct connection between Mao's waving hand onscreen and the avid faces and applauding hands of the students looking up at the screen, Li's photographic memory effectively summarises the relationship between official documentary and its audience in Cultural Revolution China. The ideological hailing and interpellation that Western film theory of the cinematic apparatus sets to expose is hardly disguised here.

After the end of the Cultural Revolution and particularly in the eighties, Chinese documentary filmmaking, while mainly practiced within the official production framework of state-owned television networks, began to experiment with an apparently more liberal perspective and more humanistic approach to representing the past.