Centering on the rhetoric of love, symbolized in the form of the red and a commodity, this article examines how the regime of the red works in conjunction with emotion in representing the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) in Shanzhashu Zhi Lian (Under the Hawthorn Tree), directed by Zhang Yimou (2010). Revisiting previous studies’ asymmetrical gender relations from the era of the Cultural Revolution, this article shows how the regime of the red as both political propaganda and as flights of visual and literary imagination is utilized to contest Maoism as well as state authority, couched in emotion and Confucian rhetoric. The schema of emotion and love are configured hierarchically and yet conceived creatively to challenge its pervasive power. Furthermore, by analyzing how diegetic and non-diegetic sound and music are deployed, this study explores how the construction of a national history based on a spurious claim is destabilized by storytelling; a woman’s act of looking into the authenticity of state propaganda collides with the state’s mobilization of a local history from a legend in order to construct a unifying, vaunted national history, both of which are in flux under questioning. This study suggests that the representation of the regime of the red problematizes the interlocking site in which a truth claim and the construction of a national history are in tension, for two conflicting social forces are also at play for mystification and demystification.