Deathsong of the River

"It’s basically the script for what – with a bit but perhaps not too much exaggeration – one might say was the most important television programme that has ever been broadcast in China, and maybe one of the three or four most important in the world. If you think about programmes that really made an impact on society, such as Cathy Come Home in Britain in the sixties or Roots in the States in the eighties – River Elegy is all of that but more. Essentially it’s a sort of documentary with commentary, about why China in the 1980s – having emerged from the Cultural Revolution, and having had hundreds of years of history as a proud and confident civilisation – seems no longer to have that confidence in itself. The way in which the documentary makers look at this question is by examining the symbols of Chinese history – the dragon, the Yellow river, which have always been rather positive symbols – and instead regard them as negative. In some ways there’s a lot of Lu Xun about this. Because once again, these are people looking at a history of revolution and essentially asking the same questions that Lu Xun and the others were asking at the end of their revolution: Why has China come so far and yet progressed, relatively speaking, so little? It was very daring. Amongst other things, it subtly – but not that subtly – attacked Mao as a false peasant emperor, and instead praised the idea of embracing the Pacific Ocean, which was code for the United States and American culture, as a way of trying to revitalise China. In the ferment that was the 1980s this was a very powerful piece of programming. A hundred million viewers or even more, perhaps, saw it. It was very controversial after its first showing. Some members of the [Chinese] politburo actually tried to ban it. Other members insisted it must be shown again, and in fact it was. In a funny way the last showing of River Elegy , in August 1988, was one of the very last hurrahs of the more liberal order within the Chinese Communist Party, before the cataclysm that came the next year."