Casting most of the original leads (many of whom also began their careers on Cherish Our Love…) ostensibly the plot follows the lead couple, Wen Hui (Xu Jinglei, Go Lala Go!, Shinjuku Incident, The Warlords) and Yang Zheng (mainland TV star Li Yapeng) many years after the show’s wrapped up. This is more than just a cursory happy ever after, though. The film is actually split into three separate vignettes, with apparently nothing to link them bar the same characters. First the pair are married and successful, but Yang suspects familiarity’s bred more than contempt when he walks out on Wen Hui and she doesn’t seem to notice he’s gone. Then they’re down-at-heel, long since parted, dragged to a class reunion and left to wonder if they could get back together. Finally they’re wealthy again, yet separate, with Yang flying half way round the world to help Wen Hui when she’s forced to confront the sorry state of her marriage.

Given the basic premise, then, it’s a surprise just how downbeat Eternal Moment is. The opening segment is deceptively perky, in a sense – easily the happiest of the three, it’s also by far the shortest and its enthusiastic CG montages, though gorgeously stylised, make the sudden lurch into cold hard reality in the second and third acts one hell of a sucker punch. Despite frequent flashbacks to the TV show and moments of sly, blackly comic humour, this is not a film to indulge in rose-tinted memories. The idea of an ‘eternal moment’ feels as much like a wound that never quite heals as a perfect, ever-burning flame. Weirdly, for all the cutaways to real (?) couples reminiscing over the first fumbling steps in their relationship, Eternal Moment seems hell bent on reminding us young love is no guarantee of happiness.

It is very stylised at times – again, especially the occasionally bizarre theatrics of the first story, which could conceivably dissuade people who’d feel far more for the other two. Li Yapeng in particular affects a mildly stilted, masculine detachment which, when coupled with moments like a comedy bullet-time piece that’d have even David E. Kelley wincing, skirts uncomfortably close to parody. But even this is still shot through with weird moments of grace. An early sequence where Yang sprints through a dreamy CG cityscape after Wen Hui’s car is an obvious nod to Zhang’s background in commercials (not least with the product placement whipping past), but it’s far gentler and more captivating than anything Feng Xiaogang would probably have come up with.

And while its subtexts are hardly pearls of wisdom there’s still a shocking amount of dramatic weight to be had from a mainstream film saying, to all intents and purposes, that (sometimes) you can’t go home again. That no matter how close two people were back then, sometimes life refuses to let them stay together and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. That memory can be a liability more than anything else. Xu Jinglei’s own films have dabbled with the idea of self-destructive obsession (Letter From An Unknown Woman) and her big moments where she insists ‘Look, this is my life now – there’s no going back’ are hugely effective. Like Masahiro Motoki’s lonely makeup artist confronting his estranged wife in The Longest Night In Shanghai, these are well-worn tropes, but Zhang teases out the underlying pain and melancholy rather than just using them to yank on the audience’s heartstrings.

Eternal Moment is mainstream cinema, yes, but it’s not popcorn. It’s got the stamp of a major studio all over it but it’s rarely, if ever crude or tacky. It’s straightforward, basically asking whether it’s really enough for two people to be in love, yet it’s never simplistic. Zhang Yibai, his cast and crew could presumably have phoned this in, yet they did anything but. Eternal Moment turns a straightforward idea into a slow burn of quietly riveting pathos evoked by the way that under the broad gestures, the do-you-remembers and if-onlys and all the rest of it, the characters’ regrets are gradually, remorselessly laid bare. Taken on one level the finale is the expected sequence where a power ballad kicks in and Yang and Wen Hui act out a stupidly contrived Big Moment yet on another, for a major studio release it’s startlingly bleak. Even for someone who’s never seen the original television series Eternal Moment is still a riveting watch, further proof Zhang Yibai is one of the most consistently interesting commercial directors in mainland China, and comes strongly recommended.

The world is changing with really remarkable speed. If you look at the chart at the top here, you’ll see that in 2025, these Goldman Sachs projections suggest that the Chinese economy will be almost the same size as the American economy. And if you look at the chart for 2050, it’s projected that the Chinese economy will be twice the size of the American economy, and the Indian economy will be almost the same size as the American economy. And we should bear in mind here that these projections were drawn up before the Western financial crisis.

A couple of weeks ago, I was looking at the latest projection by BNP Paribas for when China will have a larger economy than the United States. Goldman Sachs projected 2027. The post-crisis projection is 2020. That’s just a decade away. China is going to change the world in two fundamental respects. First of all, it’s a huge developing country with a population of 1.3 billion people, which has been growing for over 30 years at around 10 percent a year.

And within a decade, it will have the largest economy in the world. Never before in the modern era has the largest economy in the world been that of a developing country, rather than a developed country. Secondly, for the first time in the modern era, the dominant country in the world — which I think is what China will become — will be not from the West and from very, very different civilizational roots.

 
Now I know it’s a widespread assumption in the West that, as countries modernize, they also Westernize. This is an illusion. It’s an assumption that modernity is a product simply of competition, markets and technology. It is not; it is also shaped equally by history and culture. China is not like the West, and it will not become like the West. It will remain in very fundamental respects very different. Now the big question here is obviously, how do we make sense of China? How do we try to understand what China is? And the problem we have in the West at the moment by-and-large is that the conventional approach is that we understand it really in Western terms, using Western ideas. We can’t. Now I want to offer you three building blocks for trying to understand what China is like — just as a beginning.
 

Martin Jacques is the author of When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World. He is a visiting senior fellow at the London School of Economics.He is a columnist for the Guardian and the New Statesman.

Some neighborhoods, such as SoHo, are commercial and known for upscale shopping. Others, such as Greenwich Village, the Lower East Side, Alphabet City and the East Village, have long been associated with the “Bohemian” subculture. Chelsea is a neighborhood with a large gay population, and recently a center of New York’s art industry and nightlife. Washington Heights is a vibrant neighborhood of immigrants from theDominican Republic. Chinatown has a dense population of people of Chinese descent. Koreatown is roughly bounded by 5th and 6th Avenues, between 31st and 36th Streets. The Upper West Side is often characterized as more intellectual and creative, in contrast to the old money and conservative values of the Upper East Side, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the United States.

In Manhattan, uptown means north (more precisely north-northeast, which is the direction the island and its street grid system is oriented) and downtown means south (south-southwest). This usage differs from that of most American cities, where downtown refers to the central business district. Manhattan has two central business districts, the Financial District at the southern tip of the island, and Midtown Manhattan. The term uptownalso refers to the northern part of Manhattan above 59th Street and downtown to the southern portion below 14th Street, with Midtown covering the area in between, though definitions can be rather fluid depending on the situation.

Fifth Avenue roughly bisects Manhattan Island and acts as the demarcation line for east/west designations (e.g., East 27th Street, West 42nd Street); street addresses start at Fifth Avenue and increase heading away from Fifth Avenue, at a rate of 100 per block in most places. South of Waverly Place in Manhattan, Fifth Avenue terminates and Broadway becomes the east/west demarcation line. Though the grid does start with 1st Street, just north of Houston Street (pronounced HOW-stin), the grid does not fully take hold until north of 14th Street, where nearly all east-west streets are numerically identified, which increase from south to north to 220th Street, the highest numbered street on the island. Streets in Midtown are usually one way with a few exceptions (14th, 34th and 42nd to name a few). The rule of thumb is odd numbered streets run west while evens run east.

Images allow our interpretation which is both their great strength and their great weakness. An image doesn’t tell you what to think when presented to you (although of course, we very rarely if ever see images in isolation from text or sound). This removes some amount of spin and bias. However, photographs are not neutral either. The angle, lighting, choice of subject etc all impact hugely on the way that image is likely to be interpreted and so the photographer does control your interpretation to a large extent.

The collection of photographs presented here did not include photographs of torture in Iraq under Saddam, deplorable conditions in the Gulags of the Soviet Union, living conditions in North Korea, or the dark side of Cuba. While the photographs selected were truly moving, one must at least ponder why it was that images of genocide in Cambodia and of Chinese civil rights abuses were not in the collection. We tend to forget that we see far more photos of Western, free-world problems which unfortunately distorts our perspective.

The Photograph That Gave a Face to the Great Depression
“Migrant Mother”
Dorothea Lange, 1936

As era-defining photographs go, “Migrant Mother” pretty much takes the cake. For many, Florence Owens Thompson is the face of the Great Depression, thanks to legendary shutterbug Dorothea Lange. Lange captured the image while visiting a dusty California pea-pickers’ camp in February 1936, and in doing so, captured the resilience of a proud nation facing desperate times.

Unbelievably, Thompson’s story is as compelling as her portrait. Just 32 years old when Lange approached her (“as if drawn by a magnet,” Lange said). Thompson was a mother of seven who’d lost her husband to tuberculosis.

Stranded at a migratory labor farm in Nipomo, Calif. her family sustained themselves on birds killed by her kids and vegetables taken from a nearby field – as meager a living as any earned by the other 2,500 workers there. The photo’s impact was staggering. Reproduced in newspapers everywhere, Thompson’s haunted face triggered an immediate public outcry, quickly prompting politicos from the federal Resettlement Administration to send food and supplies. Sadly, however, Thompson and her family had already moved on, receiving nary a wedge of government cheese for their high-profile misery.

In fact, no one knew the identity of the photographed woman until Thompson revealed herself years later in a 1976 newspaper article.

The Photograph That Isn’t as Romantic as You Might Think
“V-J Day, Times Square, 1945″, a.k.a. “The Kiss”
Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1945

On August 14, 1945, the news of Japan’s surrender was announced in the United States, signaling the end of World War II. Riotous celebrations erupted in the streets, but perhaps none were more relieved than those in uniform. Although many of them had recently returned from victory in

Europe, they faced the prospect of having to ship out yet again, this time to the bloody Pacific.

Among the overjoyed masses gathered in Times Square that day was one of the most talented photojournalists of the 20th century, a German immigrant named Alfred Eisenstaedt. While snapping pictures of the celebration, he spotted a sailor “running along the street grabbing any and every girl in sight.” He later explained that, “whether she was a grandmother, stout, thin, old, didn’t make any difference.”

Of course, a photo of the sailor planting a wet one on a senior citizen wouldn’t have made the cover of Life, but when he locked lips with an attractive nurse, the image was circulated in newspapers across the country. Needless to say, “V-J Day” didn’t capture a highly anticipated embrace by long-lost lovers, but it also wasn’t staged, as many critics have claimed. In any case, the image remains an enduring symbol of America’s exuberance at the end of a long struggle.

The Atomic Bomb
August 9, 1945

The picture was taken from one of the B-29 Superfortresses used in the attack on Nagasaki. The Fat Man mushroom cloud resulting from the nuclear explosion rises 18 km from the point of impact.

Over 50 million people died in the Second World war, but, the atomic bomb left humanity fearing the next world war could be utterly devastating.

From a single bomb, over 150,000 people died at Hiroshima and 80,000 in Nagasaki.

On 6 August 1945, the 393d Bombardment Squadron B-29 Enola Gay, piloted and commanded by Tibbets, lifted off from North Field at 02:45 Tinian time, with Parsons on board as weaponeer, and with the Little Boy weapon in its bomb bay. Hiroshima, an important army depot and port of embarkation, was the primary target of the mission, with Kokura and Nagasaki as alternative targets. With Farrell’s permission, Parsons completed the bomb assembly in the air to minimize the risks during takeoff. At 08:09 Tibbets started his bomb run and handed control over to his bombardier, Major Thomas Ferebee. The bomb was released from 31,600 feet (9,600 m) shortly after 09:15 and the aircraft made a 150° turn to maximize the distance between itself and the blast.

Jonathan Klein runs Getty Images, a stock photo agency whose vast archive of still photography and illustrations is a mainstay of the creative class.