This film is telling a story of a young, village girl who bravely resists old-dated customs and searches for freedom.

At the 24th Hong Kong Film Awards ceremony on 27 March 2005, a list of 100 Best Chinese Motion Pictures was tallied, and Yellow Earth came in fourth.

"[2] Gu Qing, a soldier from the propaganda department of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) Eighth Route Army in CCP-controlled Shaanxi, travels alone from Yan'an to the northern KMT-controlled area of Shaanxi, Shanbei, in the early spring of 1939, with the task of collecting the peasants' folk songs in order to re-write them with communist lyrics in order to boost the morale of the Eighth Route Army soldiers.

He reaches a small village where he is assigned to live with a poor as well as illiterate family with the task of recording local folk songs for use in the propagandized communist cause.

The father in the family, an old widower, dislikes Gu's re-telling of social reforms about women receiving education and choosing who they will marry on their own terms within the communist domain in the province's south, but Cuiqiao, his hard-working daughter, happily listens to his tales and is joyful when her younger brother, Hanhan, becomes friends with Gu.

The story then focuses on the girl, who at only age 14, is told that she must marry a significantly older man in only a few months' time as her wedding dowry was used to pay for her mother's funeral and brother's engagement.

Cuiqiao informs Hanhan that she wants to run away to join the army and she tells him to take care of their father and give Gu some hand-sewn insoles whenever he comes back.

At night, she tries to cross the turbulent Yellow River while singing a song taught by Gu Qing, but whether she makes it across remains unclear.

The chemistry between Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou is well presented in this film because it is marked as a signature work that initiated the fifth generation Chinese cinema.

Fifth generation directors create distinctive works because they add political allegories into their films that make them different from conventional and social-realist filmmaking.

[6] According to the Chinese CCTV review of Yellow Earth, this film illustrates the helplessness of the people living amongst the feudal society.

This new way of filmmaking emphasizes a lonely and powerless mood, that human beings are too small and weak amongst the great yellow earth.

Specifically, he explains, the film is made when Chen Kaige can intimately get in contact with Shaanxi people's life in the particular time point.

[9] From then on, Yan 'an became the seat of the CCP Central Committee, the capital of the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region, the command center and strategic rear area of the Second Sino-Japanese War.

On February 21, 1937, the third plenary session of the Kuomintang Central Committee passed a resolution to accept the establishment of a united front proposed by the Communist Party.

In addition to yellow, the film also highlights three colors, namely black cotton-padded jacket, white towel, red wedding dress, cover, etc.

The inspiration of the protagonist's, Guqing's, portrayal comes from Ke Lan himself, who was once a young cultural worker from Yan'an on a folksong collection mission.

The original novel, cited from an journal, "reads more like a piece of  adolescent fantasy, is about an unlikely but probable romance between Guqing and Cuiqiao, who committed suicide to defy an arranged marriage."

The author claims that "Chen Kaige managed to de-sexualize Ke Lan's original text by casting Gu Qing in his thirties and Cuiqiao as a fourteen-year-old teenager".

[12] Yellow Earth is a contentious film that put forward some intriguing issues among censors and the local audience upon release.

The relationship between this aesthetic work and political discourse is critical because of the film's story background and its release year, where major historical events took place (wars and revolutions).

According to scholar Esther Yau, author of "Yellow Earth": Western Analysis and a non-Western Text, the film ironically showcases the soldier's failure to bring about any changes, both in material and ideological levels, "in the face of invincible feudalism and superstition among the masses transgresses socialist literacy standards".

According to Yau, it is a fact that the censors were highly dissatisfied with the film's "indulgence with poverty and backwardness",[13] which inserts negative and poor images to the country.

[14] It is also true that the addition of Daoist aesthetics added extra layers of meaning to the films that differentiate it from other Communist products during that period, according to scholar Mary Farquhar, author of The "Hidden" Gender in Yellow Earth.

In addition, as stated by Chen Kaige in an interview, Yellow Earth is a symbolic work that highlights the lives of peasants and hints at a "voice of reform".

[13] He compared the cinematography of the film to classical Chinese art, using a limited amount of colors, natural lighting, and a non-perspectival use of filmic space.

[13] Critics also called the film being opaque and flat, in comparison to other melodramas in China at the time, particularly highlighting the scene when Cui Cao is forced to marry an old stranger.

The film was also scrutinized for being ironic in its depiction of revolutionary ideals in comparison to the reality of how the soldiers failed to bring out any material or ideological changes within the story.

[17]: 42  Its reception outside China was mostly positive, where during its premiere at the 1985 Hong Kong International Festival, it was touted as "an outstanding breakthrough", "expressing deep sentiments poured onto one's national roots", and "a bold exploration of film languages".