And while his image still looms large, it's hard to say that China these days is a socialist state. Many would argue that Mao's revolution was extremely short-lived, and that the real change in China happened in 1911. That's when the Chinese Republic ended 3,000 years of dynastic history and forever broke the cyclical pattern the Chinese had used to understand their past. I mean, at least in some senses, those nationalist revolutionaries literally put an end to history. That sense of living in a truly new world has made many great and terrible things possible for China. But the legacy of China's two revolutions is mixed at best. China, for instance, made most of the camera we're using to film this video.