How do revolutions get started? Obviously, rebellions begin with serious discontents about oppression, corruption and so on. The protest movement which began at Tiananmen Square in Beijing ten years ago this June was not really a revolution, although it could have turned into one. Oppression and corruption were certainly two of its root causes. But there were other influences, of a more cultural nature, which inspired the protesters. One of them was a television movie made a year before, in 1988. It was titled Yellow River Elegy.
This six-part series emerged from an intellectual trend in China in the late 1980s known as culture fever. Culture, like religion, is often a substitute for political expression. After decades of wooden communist culture, slash-and-burn revolutionary modernism and murderous political campaigns, Chinese intellectuals turned to traditional Chinese culture to find answers to China’s contemporary problems.
China’s descent into impotence has been an intellectual obsession since the middle of the last century, when British gunships exposed its weaknesses during the Opium Wars. How could the Middle Kingdom, the centre of civilisation, have been so easily humbled by long-nosed barbarians and, later, by the “dwarf bandits” from Japan? These were the questions asked by Chinese intellectuals in the 1890s, in the 1910s, in the 1930s and again in Yellow River Elegy.
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