River Elegy

I remember watching Chinese television docu-mentary 河殇 (He Shang, or River Elegy) almost two decades ago with a sense of awe, but unfortunately with terribly little real understanding then, and even now.

According to W. J. F. Jenner in his book The Tyranny of History - The Roots of China's Crisis (The Penguin Press, 1994), the "amateurishly made but hotly controversial" television series "was screened in 1988 to the delight of all those who see China's past as a dead weight from which people need to be freed if China is to have a future."

Using the Yellow River (pictured) as a symbol of China, River Elegy blamed traditional norms and values for most of the country's problems.

As Jenner noted, "even when first shown, the series aroused much hostility from people who were appalled by what they saw as its negation of much of China's past."

"The end of the Mao era had more or less corresponded with the death of the radical aspects of Mao's traditional approach to history, so that there was now a growing divergence between those who were more conservative than ever about the past and those who wanted an intellectual and emotional break from it."

Interestingly, Jenner wrote that former leader Zhao Ziyang （赵紫阳) not only allowed River Elegy to be aired, he also suppressed publication of an article attacking it. The article only saw the light of day "after the People's Liberation Army washed Peking's streets in blood."

"When it did appear the piece by the pesudonymous Ji Jiayan was as vitriolic in its denunciation of River Elegy as Yao Wenyuan （姚文元） had been in his attacks on writers in the 1960s - and Yao had done something without precedent in human history by rising between 1966 and 1976 to the highest levels of power on the strength of unpleasant book reviews."

"If Yao was reading the People's Daily in his cell in 1989 he would have approved of Ji Jiayan's style and recognized the sort of ideological terrorism that in his day could leave its victims in gaol or even dead. The ferocity of the attack shows that River Elegy had hit its mark."