CBS Reports is a long-form documentary television series launched by CBS News in 1959, designed as a platform for in-depth investigative reporting and international documentary journalism. Distinct from later programs of the same name, the original series presented feature-length nonfiction reports on Cold War geopolitics, science and technology, war, social change, and global political systems, using on-location filming and extended narrative structures rather than studio news formats. It established a model for serious broadcast documentary journalism that influenced subsequent public-affairs and investigative television programming.

Joris Ivens’s wartime documentary of China’s resistance to the Japanese invasion, cross-cutting civilian exodus and bombing with the Nationalist state’s mobilization—schools, industry, dispersed war production, foreign relief—and guerrilla fighting. Framing an ancient nation of “400 million,” it contrasts tradition with modernization and closes on the unresolved question of victory.