this is the story of a film that helped change the world. It was made 13 years ago. It had an audience of 600m and its bold message was part of a chain reaction which led to one of the most publicised human rights violations of our times, the Tiananmen Square massacre. Yet few people outside China have heard of it. The recent book documenting the background to the violations, The Tiananmen Papers, doesn't mention it.
Exactly one year before the events in Beijing of June 1989, a polemical documentary was aired on Chinese television that created the greatest controversy in China's 30-year broadcasting history. The film, called Heshang, advocated a full-scale adoption of "western ideas."
Heshang comprised six one-hour documentaries. Each episode, made by a different film-maker, looked at an aspect of the history of the 3,400 mile long Yellow River and its impact on Chinese culture and economics. Billed as a search for a modern China and according to one of its producers, Su Xiaokang, conceived of as contemporary political commentary, the film explored the reasons why China's economy had not kept up with those of western countries. Heshang argued that the Yellow River, "cradle of civilisation" had long imposed on Chinese culture a land-locked conformism, a uniform Confucian ideology, which isolated the country from global economics. The fifth episode ("Anxiety and Misery") contrasted the limitations of Yellow River civilisation with the multi-ethnicity and freedom of maritime culture (the "Azure Blue" of episode six). Construction of the Great Wall, argued the film, had further isolated China.
Heshang's methods were not those of Panorama. Instead of current affairs voiceovers and reportage, it used popular narratives in the manner of Homer or Chaucer to speak to as broad an audience as possible. Its artistic interest, according to some critics, lay in how it contrasted two systems of imagery, yellow and blue, to represent respectively China's past and future.
The impact was extraordinary. More than half of the Chinese population saw Heshang. The broadcaster received thousands of letters of congratulation. All the national newspapers serialised its script, some on the front page. The film was understood by intellectuals, workers, students and peasants alike. Seven books were instantly written about it. Peoples' summer camps were organised to discuss it.
But soon signs emerged that the Heshang phenomenon was ruffling feathers. After its first broadcast, it was banned in Beijing. The Propaganda ¨Department belatedly concluded that Heshang was "unpatriotic" and "anti-communist" and shouldn't be rerun. Zhao Ziyang, one of its few supporters in government, was ousted after the events in Tiananmen Square. Its producers, Su Xiaokang and Wang Luxiang, were wanted by party leaders. Wang was arrested, Su fled to France and then to the US. The film became a cause c?lèbre in overseas Chinese communities. Students everywhere argued over it.
Piecing together the production history of Heshang was not easy for those Chinese scholars who first attempted it. The film-makers are now scattered around the world. No retrospective audience survey is possible. It was a massive phenomenon-the biggest single audience ever for a documentary film-but the clampdown has made it difficult to judge its lasting effects. Some have tried: "Politically, it is the most significant event since the party crackdown on liberal ideas in the 'anti-bourgeoisie' movement in December 1986," wrote Tuen-yu Lau and Yuet-keung Lo in the only full account of the film available in English. "An understanding of some of the chain reactions to Heshang would... shed light on the inevitable outbreak of turmoil and bloodshed in Tiananmen Square."
Heshang obviously scared the hell out of Deng Xiaoping. Its aesthetic and historical boldness brought debate about the future of China to every street corner. Since Mao's death in 1976, a tentative civic society had emerged, where people could debate political ideas in public. But Heshang was a gigantic discursive advance, an assimilation of a decade of pro-western ideas, a massive work of revisionism. It added substantially to the momentum of pro-democracy student movements. But the tanks were readying. A film had pushed too far. The idealistic minds of what Deng called "the scum of the Chinese nation" had been too taken by its arguments.
At least that's how it sounds. I've read the script of the film, but I haven't seen it. I suspect that if it has been shown at all in Britain it has only been screened privately. When I was programming the Edinburgh Film Festival, I broached the idea of a screening and seminar. It proved impossible.
It may of course be the case that Heshang is not a great film. After all, the television series Holocaust had a huge impact in Germany, but was highly inaccurate and a gift to neo-Nazi revisionists. Other films, such as Abuladze's Soviet work Repentance, have had huge impact on the future of their countries, but Heshang is certainly the least known and amongst the most tragic. It is time to screen the film, gather the film-makers and put on record its effects.
