2 Film, Family, and Feeling: Ganging Images of children and children themselves are important for China’s secu- rity. You see, if children are not guided correctly they can easily become corrupted. Look at me...I had no Mother when I was a child. My Father didn’t care about me. I was brought up in a boarding school. But I read a good many books. I also watched a great many lefi-wing films in the 1930s. Twice the town where I was living was lost [captured by Japanese forces] Once in Manchuria, and once in Beijing. The second time it happened, in Beijing, I determined to leave. If I stayed what could I do? Work for the Japanese? What would that make of me? Who would I be? 'd have become @ housewife [taitai]. (Yu Lan, 1921-, actress and founder, Children’s Film Studio, interview 1999). This chapter argues that cinema and children’s film production in con- temporary China offer a glimpse of the ties that persist between revolution- ary morality and the future. The observation on which this claim rests is the striking continuity in the interpolation of ganging, or “warmth of human feeling” in the films supported and produced by the Children’s Film Studio since 1984. It may not seem surprising that films produced for children should be about human warmth and kindness. The apparent connection between revolutionary ganqing (the political—not romantic—‘feeling” be- tween people of the same class) and the relationships in the Children’s Film Stuclio films, however, is arguably specific to recent Chinese history. In the films, the warmth of feeling does not emphasise class feeling, but it is de- scribed through the on-screen dependencies of young children and older people. The director of the studio itself (Yu Lan) and most of the members of the supporting’ institution, the Children’s Film Society, grew up in the 1920s and. 1930s. Their moral outlook was to a significant degree shaped