TWO days after I interviewed the young Chinese film-maker Lin Jianjie, Donald Trump escalated the trade trade war between the US and China with the comment that “we should never have let them get so rich.” 

What does it mean for Chinese socialism to have allowed its population to “become rich,” and what does contemporary Chinese culture tell us about this?

In Lin’s film Brief History of a Family, he brings a precise, through-a-microscope attention to this very question. “The government,” he says, “doesn’t mention much about class difference,” but when he had the idea for the film he knew “it has to be about the ‘new middle class’ that is rising. This is a very new contemporary theme about China.”