Three
Heshang and the Paradoxes of the Chinese Enlightenment

Heshang (Yellow river elegy), a six-part miniseries, was first broadcast on China's Central Television in the year of the dragon in 1988. The irony of the timing could not have been lost on the Chinese audience, whose responses to the documentary's condemnation of the totem symbol of the dragon and the thousand-year-old "yellow culture" ranged from indignation to heated debate and unreserved acclaim. Broadcast nationwide twice between June and August that year, Heshang stirred up a tornado of controversy.^[1] Truly, as one critic observed in awe, the miniseries was "a rare spectacle in the thirty years' history of Chinese television."^[2] By 1989 when the collection of critical essays Chongping "Heshang" (Reassessing "Yellow River elegy") was published, Chinese intellectuals' critique of the TV series had already crystallized into a clear outline. Heshang 's scriptwriters were criticized for propagating a view of politics and history that advanced historical fatalism, geographical determinism, the "fallacious backward ideology" of grand unification (dayitong) , Eurocentrism, total westernization, elite culturalism, the postulate of a nonsocialist new epoch, and the theory of the ultrastability of Chinese feudal society.

Those critiques provide a convenient summary of the content of Heshang . Divided into six episodes—"In Search of a Dream" ("Xunmeng"), "Destiny" ("Mingyun"), "A Glimmering Light" ("Lingguang"), "A New Epoch" ("Xinjiyuan"), "Sorrows and Crises" ("Youhuan"), and "Azure" ("Weilanse")—the documentary delivers a message loud and clear: Old China can only revive its dying culture by modernization and

westernization. The deepening sense of crisis that pervaded the six episodes echoed Zhao Ziyang's devastating proclamation at the Thirteenth Party Congress in October 1987: "China is now in the primary stage of socialism." Su Xiaokang, in his retrospective account of how he started writing the script in early 1988, remembers those days as "ominous," "restless," and "anxiety ridden."^[3] The year of 1988, in fact, evoked the superstitious Chinese fear of epochal disasters, which, according to folk belief, never fail to recur at every twelve-year cycle of the dragon year. After all, 1976 shook the entire country with a succession of events of unparalleled magnitude: Zhou Enlai's death, the earthquake at Tangshan, and Mao Zedong's demise. A cycle later, an airplane crash in Chongqing, widespread pestilence in Jiangsu, and the inflation in early 1988 were unpropitious enough to conjure another bout of widespread apocalyptic anxiety in both the cities and countryside.

Heshang 's irresistible power resides precisely in its capture, in stark aquatic imagery, of the intensifying crisis consciousness that a failing urban reform inevitably triggered. The apocalyptic mood of late 1987 and 1988 found its most convincing embodiment in the recurrent images of the turbulent floods of the Yellow River. And, from the reformist vantage point, what other image but the open expanse of the Pacific Ocean—a symbol of the indigo myth of modernity—can provide an ultimate exit for the river and, metaphorically, for those "descendants of the dragon" in search of a new dream?

This is the finale, rich in its implications, that greets us on the television screen in episode six: The Yellow River flows into the ocean and meets surging billows of azure blue. The panoramic view of the collision of the turbid and the transparent, which inspired the Tang poet Wang Zhihuan with such aesthetically engaged tranquillity, is turned into a haunting image of ambivalence in the final climactic moments of Heshang .^[4]

Does the physical landscape of the encounter tell the story of the voluntary submission of the river to the ocean, as many CCP ideologues have charged? Or as Su Xiaokang contended in the documentary, does it embody the historical necessity of the life force of a nation moving from enclosure to openness? The first reading, which imbues the merger with the symbolism of annexation, brings to the fore the issue of the power relationship of the river versus the ocean, in which the former is seen to represent China, and the latter, Western imperialism. Such an interpretation cancels any possibility of treating both the river and the ocean as images of space that speak of the irrevocable passage from the

confined to the immeasurable, and thus of the subversion of boundary, whether national, ideological, or psychological. Indeed, the finale of Heshang often makes one wonder whether a spectacle of such magnitude is framed in power symbolism that calls for the compulsive identification of the dominated and the dominator, or whether it is framed in space symbolism in which the issue of hegemony gives way to that of developmental process.

Heshang provides no easy solution to these questions in either its verbal or visual construction of what the Yellow River stands for. In fact, much of the power of the documentary derives from its shifting movement between these two sets of symbolism, which provokes conflicting moods of pessimism and optimism in narrator and audience. Yet despite the deprecatory tone that characterizes its initial portrayal of the river, the documentary seems to end in a dramatic reversal to conclude on a note of optimism. What greets our eyes on the screen at the end is no longer the raging river personified as the capricious or ruthless tyrant, but instead, the image of a heroic and triumphant Yellow River that surges toward the estuary in an ambivalent victory: "It is the anguish of the Yellow River, it is the hope of the Yellow River, that contribute to the greatness of the Yellow River. . . . The Yellow River has arrived at the mouth of the ocean—a magnificent but painful juncture. It is here that the mud and slit carried turbulently along for thousands of li [one li equals about one-third of a mile] will be deposited to form a new mainland" (Heshang 283–84).^[5]

The Yellow River, characterized earlier as "China's sorrow" and an "unpredictable" destroyer as old as China's debilitating civilization itself, suddenly emerges as a life force that not only signifies "hope" but also promises the forming of a "new mainland." The ambivalence that underlies the symbolism of the Yellow River gives away the mood of the 1980s, an era caught in the tension between ideological enclosure and an infinitely expanding psychological space. Ironically, the vision of Heshang , which is riddled with ambiguities, impressed most of its critics as relentlessly unambiguous and coherent. Indeed, even those who attacked the documentary most vigorously have taken at face value its claim to be a genuine reflection on China's cultural traditions (wenhua fansi) . Although many critiques ridicule the scriptwriters' poetic immersion in history and their aesthetic impulse to clothe and capture the chaos of the phenomenal world in a number of stable images, few do justice to the ideological ambivalence that informs the mode of thinking of modern and contemporary Chinese intellectuals—the enlightened elite, who are

ironically no less nostalgic for power symbolism than their historical Confucian counterparts whom they roundly condemn.

It is the paradoxical vision of such a conflict-ridden intelligentsia that makes Heshang an intriguing ideological discourse and a work whose complexity continues to evade critics who find gratification in undertaking various ventures that justify either the cause of dogmatic Marxism or that of historiography. One such undertaking, earnestly pursued by both ideological zealots and academic historians, is the identification of the problematic citations and entries that Su Xiaokang culled from historical data to support his thesis.^[6] As a narrative that is closer to a popular account of the philosophy of culture (wenhua zhexue) than to history itself, Heshang falls easy prey to the meticulous inspection of those erudite scholars whose concept of historical narrative is confined to that of chronicle. A less tedious, if less successful, critical enterprise revolves around the rigorous yet somewhat futile arguments over a set of familiar and sometimes clichéd issues: the vice and virtue of agrarian versus maritime civilization, the revolutionary significance of the peasant revolts that punctuated Chinese history, the fallacy of geographical determinism in history, the historical materialist versus the idealist view of history, doubts as to whether the Yellow River embodies the only source and center of ancient Chinese civilization, and the reasons why modern China failed to provide a fertile cradle for the rise of capitalism.

Although one could argue that these issues are crucial to our understanding of China's historical and recent past, they fall short of providing a vantage point for the examination of the documentary as a historical narrative in its own right. To do full justice to the controversial stance of Heshang , one needs to go beyond the familiar issues and address a different set of questions that reveals both the power and the limitations of its ideological discourse. I argue that both the potency and the limits of Heshang derive from its paradoxical approach to the concept of history, cultural symbolism, and the relationship between nationalism and enlightenment.

The Historical Past: Unawakened Dream or a Nightmare?

At first glance, Heshang seems self-consciously revolutionary in its destruction of the privileged status of China's historical past. It reiterates the message that "history is burden" through visual representations of those traumatic historical moments that contributed to the poverty and

downfall of a once-glorious empire. In contrast to the desolate image of historical ruins and barren loess plateau, the future is projected through a simplified vision of the modern, embodied in specious outer-space imagery and metropolitan vistas of skyscrapers and Japanese bullet trains. The contrast between the old and the new is defined in terms of irreconcilable conflict. It seems only logical that the documentary condemns the characteristically Chinese orientation toward the past as the repository of a paradigm of society's ideal form. The chilling sight of the endless rows of Qin Shihuang's terra-cotta warriors effortlessly evokes the association of tyranny and history. The message is clear: Only by liberating human intelligence from the stifling sense of history will the Chinese people creatively confront the problems of the present. The past conceived as such is viewed as the antithesis rather than as the basis of what Chinese intellectuals revere and value in their own present.

But one may ask, What perspective do they revere? What interest do Chinese intellectuals now serve that leads them to bring the historical past to the bar of judgment? At first glance, the conscious claims of Heshang seem to answer these questions. Su Xiaokang and his generation of enlightened intellectuals attempt to provide us with a new perspective in place of the vision of the imperial past. And in catering to the needs of the present and future, they argue that imperial nationalism, which defined the interest of old China, must be replaced by a genuine cultural enlightenment. A close examination of the documentary, however, gives the lie to such claims.

For Frederic Wakeman, one of the most telling lines in the production is Su Xiaokang's nostalgic comment on the passing of a dream: "Our dream of a thousand-year empire ended at the time of Emperor Kangxi" (186).^[7] The perspective discredited here is certainly that of the imperial past, and the national self-interest condemned is none other than the dreaming of an everlasting sovereignty. However, those with an attentive ear can hardly miss the subtle discrepancy that exists between the intellectual and emotional content of this telling lament. Although the narrator attempts to ridicule the delusions of patriotic dreamers, conflicting emotions riddle the intentionally sarcastic voice with unrelieved sentimentalism. The preaching of the futility of dreaming such a dream is unmistakably accompanied by a deeply seated, albeit unconscious, nostalgia for the golden past. Even at those moments when Su Xiaokang preaches most eloquently the elimination of such nostalgia, his vision for the future is helplessly and unconsciously embedded in the same rhetoric of imperialistic nationalism. At its heart, Heshang often

betrays the cause of enlightenment and lapses into the nationalist discourse it is struggling so hard to free itself from. In fact, such suggestive passages run through the entire script, and when examined together they reveal a mentality that Heshang itself deplores and castigates with rhetorical persuasiveness:

Why did the industrial civilization that signals [the coming of] immense wealth fail to emerge in Chinese society? (230, emphasis mine)

Yet the Four Great Inventions did not fare so well in their homeland. The first Chinese who kindled the rocket-like firecrackers that would eventually conquer outer space was nonetheless not the first human being who flew toward the cosmos . (217, emphasis mine)

Although as early as the eleventh century Shen Kuo had described the compass and magnetic field in his Meng Xi bitan , China never emerged as a strong ocean empire . (217)

Why did China fail to maintain the great lead it used to have ...? Why did China fail to maintain its cultural and political domination over the world? (216)

If Hainan Province were to be successful [in its economic projects], it would establish a liaison with the fourteen coastal cities. And together they will form a gigantic economic dragon on the Pacific. . . . This historical miracle would definitely bring new tints to Chinese culture. (278)

The modern elite are, after all, dreaming the same dream as their forebears of the dynastic past: wealth, power, and hegemony. The obsession of the old Confucian official-gentry with the domination of the Chinese empire is merely replaced by the same overriding interest in the power of the modern nation-state. It is a power that is presented as an abstracted monolithic structure external to its relationship with society and the individuals that make up the nation. What Heshang forcefully calls for—the agenda of enlightenment by means of cultural introspection—is time and again eclipsed by a stronger, perhaps unconscious drive for what it rejects—the revival of the glorious past in the future. Though they propose a creative historical amnesia, Su Xiaokang and his fellow iconoclasts never successfully sever their deep emotional ties to what dynastic history symbolizes. The dragon metaphor that they mock and repudiate in the first episode of the series comes back to haunt them with its potent symbolism in the final episode. One cannot help asking why the vision of an extended coastal economic zone should find its embodiment in nothing other than a cultural symbol that was relegated by the documentary to an ignominious historical past. Once stripped of its imperial garment, the symbol of the debilitated

totem animal, we are surprised to find, is paradoxically but conveniently transformed into a symbol of modernity. The reference to the "gigantic economic dragon" introduces a dramatic reversal of what Su Xiaokang preached earlier. It marks one of the most illuminating moments of ideological paradox in Heshang .

The project of the liberation of the present from the burden of history is thus contradictory. When the construction of new mental categories is embedded within the old nationalist and imperial discourse, such a project is doomed to contradict itself. Those who call for oblivion remain captive to the ideological preconceptions that they fail to recognize as their own. What empowers the discourse of Heshang also serves to constrict it. History is both the dream and the nightmare from which neither the Chinese people nor the intellectuals themselves have awakened. Little has changed since the May Fourth Movement. Su Xiaokang and his generation of intellectuals inherited not only the iconoclastic tradition of their predecessors, but also the superiority-inferiority complex that characterizes the May Fourth generation's reflection of China's past.

Since iconoclasm was generated by the external force of imperialism in the case of May Fourth, the enlightenment program could quickly reverse itself and be transformed from a discourse of genuine self-reflection into a counterimperialist and eventually nationalist discourse. The cause of such an enlightenment, which called for the liberation of the individual from the tyranny of tradition, easily reverted to the political and collective cause of reviving the nation (minzu ) and, ironically, of preserving the national essence. It seems inevitable that in the context of enlightenment as such, any introspective look into China's historical past engenders an ambivalent attitude that makes Chinese intellectuals at once proud of and hostile toward their own cultural and national heritage, while defiant toward and subservient to the imported Western culture at the same time. It is this emotional complex, which I designate as the "superiority-inferiority complex," and other critics designate as "an unbalanced mentality," that doomed the New Culture Movement from the beginning and compelled even the most enlightened reformers to give up the agenda of enlightenment for the cause of patriotism.^[8]

The creative tension between intellectual emancipation and nationalism continues to characterize the struggles China is engaged in to this day in shaping and articulating its own modernity. It has become a predictable pattern, as Vera Schwarcz demonstrates in her work, that the official commemoration of May Fourth always seeks to highlight the role of nationalism in defining, or more specifically redefining, the movement, whereas

in contrast the aging veterans of 1919 come to remember and consecrate May Fourth as primarily an enlightenment movement.^[9]

It is worth noting that no one seems more anxious to revive the image of the movement as such than post-Mao intellectuals. Both Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu turned to May Fourth in their discussions of the ongoing controversy over traditionalism and modernism that made up the cultural platform before June 4, 1989. Not surprisingly, May Fourth appeared to both of them as having failed to fulfill its cultural missions. What intrigues me the most, however, is not their lament over the unfulfilled vision of their spiritual forebears, but rather their observation of an inexplicable emotional complex of Chinese intellectuals. Li Zehou mentions in passing the problem posed by such a "complex structure of cultural psychology."^[10] Liu Zaifu goes a step further by defining it in terms of tianchao qingjie , "the complex of the Dynasty of Heaven,"^[11] an equivalent to superiority complex, or in terms of Liu's subjectivity theory, a fixation with the concept of "cultural subjectivity."

The implications of the discovery of such a complex are manifold. Most significantly, the dichotomous paradigm of enlightenment versus patriotism can no longer be viewed as stable. Whereas the sentiment of patriotism is relatively unambiguous, the quest for enlightenment cannot be characterized so easily. Inasmuch as its advocates often fall prey to the two conflicting cultural orientations—the inferiority-superiority complex—such a quest is doomed to be self-defeating, since eventually it will fail to close the gap between its inner motivation and its professed goal. What "drowned out the quieter imperatives" of enlightenment is therefore not only the "pressure for political conformity," but no less importantly, albeit more subtly, the pressure of the cultural unconscious.^[12] It is illuminating that even an enlightened scholar such as Li Zehou provides no exception to this rule. Despite his advocation of the importance of englightenment in reevaluating May Fourth, he fell prey to a thematic formula that had misguided a generation of reform intellectuals in the 1920s and that Su Xiaokang reproduces with little variation in Heshang : "Although the wealth and power of our nation (modernization ) still emerges as the primary agenda for Chinese people, the relationship between enlightenment and national survival is after all very different."^[13]

What appears ominous, and indeed ironic, is not so much Li's reminder that the agenda of contemporary China is no different from that of imperial China. It is the equation he sets up between fuqiang and xiandai hua , "wealth and power" and "modernization." If the quest of modernity is motivated by the compulsion to recover the status of the "Dynasty

of Heaven," then modernity is ultimately identical to the political and economic hegemony of a nation. Li Zehou's vision of enlightenment thus remains as confined as that of his May Fourth predecessors.

Su Xiaokang, now an exile in the United States, in retrospect came to deplore his idea of "saving the nation through cultural reform" (wenhua jiuguo ), viewing it as a dream after all.^[14] However, little did he realize that the dream was marred not because he mistakenly scapegoated traditional culture for the failures of the socialist system, but because the slogan itself implies an ideological construct that is fundamentally self-contradictory, therefore impossible to fulfill. The claims of enlightenment that are predicated on the autonomy of the individual inevitably contradict the utilitarian and collective interests of nationalism. The schema often reiterated in the European Englightenment—the assertion that the private and the public interest coincide—confronts its most powerful antithesis in the May Fourth Movement, in the aborted attempts of the Chinese enlightenment philosophers to come to terms with an enlightenment that is forced upon them by the threat of imperialism, and in their attempts to solve the contradiction between the interest of the individual and that of the nation-state.^[15] The failure to recognize the often hostile relationship between these two entities inevitably results in the making and aborting of the same dream.

By the same token, insofar as the agenda of enlightenment is generated from a nationalist sentiment that pursues the vision of China as a global power, the reform intellectuals will continue to rely on an interpretive scheme of the past that privileges the first term in such bipolar concepts as superiority and inferiority, wealth and poverty, dominator and dominated, and inventor and emulator. The dynamic relations between Chinese culture and its Western counterpart will continue to be pared down to a comparison of their relative power, defined only in terms of competitiveness. And the Chinese people will forever be haunted by those moments of the past that sustain their vision for a future that perpetuates not only the myth of immense wealth and the draconic stature of its economy, but also the cultural and political domination of the Chinese nation—conceptual categories that lead them back to the program of nationalism, and thus, ironically, to the historical past they are told to forget. Until englightenment is generated from the genuine impulse of self-examination, until China's intellectuals resolve their superiority-inferiority complex toward their own culture and history, the project of enlightenment will remain a spurious one, forever submerged by the thousand-year-old discourse of power. The lesson that Heshang delivers

is dire: The nationalist complex that characterizes the way the elite intellectuals look at China's historical past determines the deep structure of their historical imagination for the future. This is a vicious cycle that Su Xiaokang himself warns against, but which he involuntarily reproduces.

Thus the most transparent moment of Heshang ironically coincides with its most opaque moment, a moment crystallized in a one-liner: "It seems that many things in China have got to start over again from May Fourth" (279). The spiritual journey back to May Fourth is both potentially dangerous and liberating. It is a quest whose meaning is as vaguely suggested in Heshang as the cultural reform it promises to launch. Perhaps it is the perpetual struggle between the elite intellectuals' nostalgic gaze at the historical past and their conscious efforts to break free of its tenacious hold that contributes to the conceptual complexity and emotional ambivalence that infuses the one-liner.^[16] One wonders where this suggestive look at May Fourth might lead Su Xiaokang and his elite colleagues and what kind of obsession with the burden of history prompted the unrelenting satirist of history to keep turning back to it. Will this retrospective look send them back into the circular maze of tradition and modernity, nationalism and enlightenment, a route that many eminent May Fourth reformers, Hu Shi and Lu Xun among them, have traced? Or can one hope that the nostalgic look at the history of May Fourth may yet lead contemporary intellectuals to a very different path?^[17]

The Fallacy Of Ultrastability?

Su Xiaokang's fascination with May Fourth brings us to one of the most controversial theses underlying the documentary: the concept of Chinese history as the unbroken chain of periodic alternation between order and disorder. Su Xiaokang's desire to break this cycle of continuity leads him to envision May Fourth as a potential moment of historical discontinuity that is nonetheless never fully consummated.

If we take the theory of ultrastability at face value and divorce it from the sociopolitical and psychological context that is intimately and unconsciously woven into the wide spectrum of meanings such a theory evokes, we will inevitably agree with the principal charge that Heshang propagates an essentially idealist concept of the historical field. In fact, it is an easy task to blame the scriptwriters for their conceptual fallacy of reducing the changing historical process to a formal and coherent totality. What Su Xiaokang and Jin Guantao deliver is an unambiguously

synchronic view of history. They argue that insofar as there is movement in Chinese history at all, there is no development, only cyclical recurrence. It does not take much historical understanding to comprehend the simple truth that history knows nothing that is identical. Why then did Su Xiaokang and his team take such pains to construct the illusion of identity to account for the mechanism of a historical process that is in reality characterized by the deep structure of change and heterogeneity?

We may never find a convincing answer to this question. Yet if we insist on examining Heshang from the standpoint of the traditional historian, we will continue to miss the ideological implications of the documentary. We need first of all to remind ourselves that it was not produced for the college history curriculum, but for mass consumption. It was not written as a historical text, but rather as a historical narrative of popular interest, presupposing the fictive character of the reconstruction of the events it purports to represent and explain. The promotion of historical action rather than the transmission of pure knowledge serves as the focal point of reference to the emotive content of Heshang . Although Su Xiaokang never clearly indicates whether such an action should be defined in terms of cultural or economic reform, the production of the documentary was meant to arouse the masses to action by effecting a deep structural transformation not only of society and its ethos, but also of individuals and their moral and psychological composition.

The official revival of the Confucian cult in China today and the traditionalists' call for a restructuring of the conceptual categories of Confucianism serve only as examples that bear out the impressionist logic of ultrastability. The fate of Confucianism in modern China chillingly testifies to the hypothesis of a cultural unconscious that is built on the metaphor of recurrence and formal continuity. Instead of ushering in an "unhealthy" and "unprogressive" view of history, as Heshang 's belligerent critics charged, the thesis of ultrastability, which seems to assume a theoretically neutral ground, serves paradoxically as a powerful mockery of the ideological stagnation and the return complex that the Confucian revival tellingly revealed.^[18] It is the ideological implications underlying the notion of ultrastability that empower its fallacious discourse and turn an otherwise fragile academic exercise of the amateur historian into a poignant political statement in disguise.

The dream of a radical transformation of Chinese culture seems to have eluded generations of reform intellectuals. However, what Su Xiaokang contends in criticizing the ultrastability of the system is not merely the possibility of and necessity for macroscopic change of the

sociocultural and political structure of a nation. What lies at the heart of any enlightenment project, Heshang included, is first and foremost the transformation of the individual. In criticizing China's ultrastability, Su Xiaokang conveys the possibility and urgency of changing the moralpsychological structure of the Chinese individual. One should be alert to the fact that the official revival of Confucian epistemology has emerged at this historical juncture to fulfill two functions. It serves as a double-edged cultural strategy concocted by the state-party apparatus not only to withstand its imperialistic discourse of the foreign, but also to subvert the agenda of modernity and enlightenment that takes the individual as its point of departure. The deep structural transformation that Heshang hopes to witness and contribute to, if not trigger, is a process that has to take place within the consciousness of the newly discovered yet precariously balanced individual. The official project of the Confucian revival is thus potentially dangerous in that it operates in the mode of the "metaphorical identification" of the subject with the state, of the private with the public spheres, of morality with loyalty, and of past with present.^[19]

Thus Heshang opens with poignant footage of the different forms of ritualistic worship of deities—whether religious, political, or simply communal. The sight of rows and rows of pious worshippers bowing down to the icon of collectivized authority is overwhelmingly powerful and ironic. It echoes the formidable spectacle of the terra-cotta warriors and drives home one of the central motifs that unifies the six-part series, namely, the lethargic dissolution of individual consciousness into the cultural unconscious.

It is in terms of meaning of the potential struggle and liberation of the individual consciousness from the collective unconscious (whether cultural, political, or historical) that the theory of ultrastability has one more lesson to teach. Insofar as the Chinese people do not realize the crucial need for a consciousness of their own responsibility for the calamities of the past, the metaphor of recurrence on which the theory of ultrastability is based is tragically valid. The ethical moment of such a theory is reflected in its silent reminder that only in the full consciousness of such a morally irrevocable responsibility can the Chinese today create a future radically different from the past. The concept of ultrastability thus not only speaks of but also speaks to the ethical and psychological inertia that conveniently blurs the distinction between the victim and the victimizer and between conscious choice and choice by default. It is this same collective inertia of the Chinese people that finds

expression in their unreflective condemnation of China's socialist past and in their fetishistic worship of a vaguely conceived modernity.

The Fetishism Of Cultural Symbols

Inasmuch as the hidden agenda of Heshang is that of modernity, Su Xiaokang's reconstruction of the cultural symbols that make up China's discredited past appears as fictive as his reading of the recurrent pattern of Chinese history. It is fictive because the structuring principle underlying the reconstitution of "traditional" symbols is not based on tradition as an autonomous system of representations, but rather on the opposite relationships that Su Xiaokang constructs and perceives between indigenous tradition and Western modernity. To be sure, tradition is always defined in retrospect. However, in this case, its meaning not only derives from but is also evaluated by the perspective of a hostile modernity that seeks to appropriate tradition into its own system of representations. The cultural tradition thus recovered is a new mythology that answers to the problematic of an epistemological discourse in which "modernity" emerges as the dominating, albeit invisible, term. Whether "tradition versus modernity" represents the only typological mode of description for the historical dilemma China faces today is a matter that need not detain us here. It is important for us to recognize, however, that the discourse of tradition retrieved through such an oppositional mechanism appears to be a reconstructed image, intrinsically inferior because it is epistemologically derivative. It is an image that comes into being through the creative shuffling of its previous categories under the new assumptions of the discourse of modernity.

In Heshang such a creative reorganization of the past reveals itself in the documentary's awareness of its own artificiality. The theory of ultrastability is but one example of the scriptwriters' fictive understanding and representation of history. The entire project can be described as an attempt to reinvoke, in a poetic manner, the spirit of a past age. And in so doing, Su Xiaokang credited as testimony those literary works, myths, and legends that contribute as much to the eliciting of poetic truth as the documents that academic historians consider authentic primary sources. Thus not only does Heshang cite unabashedly Zhuang Zi's fable of He Bo (275-76), the legend of the dark-skinned Judge Bao (264), and many other texts of popular fiction, it also makes extensive and undifferentiated use of film clips from the Yellow Earth, The 1894 Sino-Japanese

War , and Old Well as historically meaningful data that allow us to gain access to the opaque text known as our collective past.

Perhaps China's historian-critics were less bothered by the appearance of fictional materials in the documentary than by the poetic license Su Xiaokang took in using them to justify and account for historical events.^[20] Yet the critics who charged Heshang with propagating the "man-made myth" of the tyrannical nature of the Yellow River missed the point entirely. It is precisely from this fictional logic that the value of Heshang as truth can be derived. A narrative of such an order calls for a different strategy of reading. A literal interpretation of the fictive representations of the documentary reveals only the conceptual limitations of its critics, not those of its makers. It follows that the rigid distinction between mythic thinking and historical thinking has no place in the kind of philosophical inquiry into history that characterizes the spirit of Heshang . A true critic's task is not to condemn the fictive nature of historical reflection, but rather to determine the extent to which such a mythical logic provides an adequate basis for understanding historical trends.

One could nevertheless attribute a certain utilitarian motivation to the fictive nature of Su Xiaokang's historical imagination. In a television series produced for mass consumption, the fabulous and the familiar speak directly to the public, whose interests the intellectual reformers of the documentary seek so eagerly to grasp and appeal to. I wonder if there exists a certain tenuous connection between the salesperson psychology of mass culture and Su Xiaokang's choice of the dragon, the Great Wall, and the Yellow River as the dominant cultural symbols of China's imperial past.

All three images undoubtedly form part of the diction of popular culture. And as such, each is endowed with the power to evoke the irrational reverence of the masses. Su Xiaokang understands that histories ought never to be read as unambiguous and immutable signs of the events that took place, but rather as fluid symbolic structures. And as symbols, the meanings of the wall and the river change according to the significance that they have for our current life. Su Xiaokang is at his best when he can successfully demonstrate the essentially provisional character of such cultural metaphors. When embedded in the discourse of modernity, they are charged with different emotional valences and figurative content. Thus the Great Wall, once a living presence of potent immediacy, is turned into a hollow fetish of the race. What was a justifiable source of national pride now casts a shadow over the minds of those who are

busy appropriating tradition in the service of a modernist discourse. Such a reevaluation inevitably triggers the process of demystification.

What intrigues me, however, is not so much Su Xiaokang's attempt to lay bare the fetishistic content of defunct cultural symbols as his turn toward the ocean as the new fetish for the Chinese people. One is tempted to ask: Does there exist a deeper connection between the ocean and the wall than that of the alleged contrast between the modern West and traditional China, and between openness and enclosure? The subtle connection between the two, I argue, rests on their belonging to the same repertory of power symbolism that has obsessed Su Xiaokang and Chinese intellectuals throughout the ages. What empowers the color "azure blue" is exactly what used to empower the national symbol of the Great Wall and the dragon—namely, power in the sense of expansion, glory, and aggression. Take a look at all three cultural symbols presented in Heshang : Both the wall and the dragon stand for imperial power, and the river grips Su Xiaokang's imagination primarily because of its indomitable nature.

The Great Wall, it is worth noting, has served the radical discourse of iconoclasm on more than one occasion during different historical crises. It is in the choice of this particular symbol that Su Xiaokang betrays his spiritual bond with those daring cultural critics who antedated his own generation. Lu Xun condemned the Great Wall as a symbol of enclosure and political oppression.^[21] Decades later, Huang Xiang, a member of the Enlightenment Society during the heyday of the Democracy Wall Movement, contributed to the demystification of the national symbol with a poem in which a personified Great Wall bewails its tyranny and wishes for its own demise.^[22]

The citation of the wall in Heshang thus has a history of its own. It serves to remind us of the continuity of the iconoclastic tradition that generations of disillusioned intellectuals nourished and established. The intertextual references in question cannot help but evoke the psychological burden that the iconoclasts' unfulfilled mission impose upon their spiritual heirs. However, whereas one can argue that the intertextual reference to the earlier critiques of the Great Wall bestows an aura of urgency and legitimacy on Heshang 's preoccupation with the symbol, Su Xiaokang's alleged critique of what the wall stands for—namely, psychological enclosure—often degenerates into a lament over what it fails to achieve for a people whose mind is set upon dynastic or national glory, an image inseparable from military prowess in the past and wealth in the present: "If one argues that the construction of the Great Wall under-

taken by Emperors Shi Huang of Qin and Wu of Han could still be considered an embodiment of the vigor and valor of our huaxia civilization, then the repairing project of the Wall during the Ming dynasty in the mid-fifteenth century was nothing but an act of failure and recoil" (201). From this perspective, the Great Wall is considered a "gigantic tragic monument" for it "fails to represent power, progress, and glory, but instead, it embodies enclosure, conservatism, impotent defense, and fainthearted nonoffense " (203, emphasis mine). A similar preoccupation with the hegemonic logic also underlies Su's obsession with the ocean as an alternative symbol of power. Such an obsession is most poignantly revealed in the repeated footage of the close-ups of huge masts and jumbosized sails, and no less frequently of the fleet of sails preparing for or engaging in sea battles. The Great Wall in Lu Xun and Huang Xiang's text, a symbol of oppression and alienation, recedes to the background in Su Xiaokang's vision of a wall that is far more military than psychological. The Great Wall and the ocean—defense and offense: This seems to be the inner, if not the conscious, motivation of contrasting the one with the other in Heshang .

The wall, however, is not the only symbol that Su Xiaokang problematizes but contradictorily speaks for at the same time. One cannot help but wonder why Su Xiaokang is particularly drawn to the symbol of the dragon, instead of many other symbols that are also characteristically Chinese.^[23] Is it a coincidence that Heshang repudiates one set of power symbols that have malfunctioned only to turn to another set that promises to better serve the same original purpose?

Yet no matter how deeply and unconsciously Su Xiaokang seems to have succumbed to the discourse of power, it would be unfair to characterize his entire historical project in this manner. For one thing, Heshang is not just a verbal construct. It also speaks to us through the camera. And as a visual representation, it is able to transcend the ideological enclosure determined by the written text. The visual imagery of the encircling wall and the expansive ocean embodies a different kind of symbolism; the internal logic that associates the azure blue and the Yellow River on the screen is not so much the symbolism of power as that of space. It is the suggestive vision of the camera that bestows a completely different interpretation of Su Xiaokang's choice of the ocean as an alternative to the wall and the river. The boundless ocean in contrast to the enclosed wall and the well-channeled course of the river serves as such an eloquent metaphor of the infinite possibilities of imminent emancipation that the power symbolism implicit in the merging of the river

into the ocean seems to be subsumed, for several fleeting moments, into the symbolism of space. Only seen in this light can the ocean be liberated from the symbolism of the fetish and serve as the real source of inspiration for those who now turn toward it in search of an answer.

The Quest Of The Intellectual Elite

The ending of Heshang thus tells us two different stories: one the conquest of the river by the ocean, the other, the miracle of a spatial breakthrough of the imprisoned. Because visual imagery has a life of its own and is less susceptible than verbal imagery to ideological constraint, the spectacle of the merger invites conflicting interpretations. Inasmuch as the conclusion is seen rather than derived from a logical statement, the last few minutes of the documentary embody the tour de force of a conceptual ambiguity beyond the grasp of verbal logic.

Much of the complexity of Heshang consists in such opaque moments of the ideological unconscious. Although Su Xiaokang envisions the possibility of cultural cataclysmic transformations, not only the concrete agenda, but also the real nature of such transformations eludes him. However, this ambivalence about the program of enlightenment does not cloud his vision of the role that intellectuals will assume at this historical moment. One could say that he is less inclined to be aware of what the agenda is than who the logical agenda setter will be. There is little ambiguity over who should assume the new cultural authority. Nowhere can one find a better prescription of such a privileged role than in the last episode: "History, however, created a very unique species for Chinese people—the intellectuals. . . . The weapons that could eliminate ignorance and superstition are held in their hands; they are those who could conduct a direct dialogue with maritime civilization; they are those who would irrigate the yellow earth with the fresh sweet spring of science and democracy!" (280).

Is it perhaps because Chinese intellectuals have historically been so close to the seat of power that the impulse to reinstate their vanguard position comes to haunt them time and again? Why is it that underlying the old and new enlightenment movement is the message that has undergone little change since Confucius' time—that knowledge is power? Is it this unconscious search for the privileged status that continuously eluded the modern and contemporary intelligentsia that led Su Xiaokang to lament that "Chinese intellectuals could be nothing more than mere losers in the political arena?"^[24]

Seen in the context of power politics, the project of Heshang appears less politically altruistic than its makers consciously professed. I argue that their project of modernity and enlightenment simultaneously integrates within itself the project of restructuring power in society and in the CCP and, by implication, an inherent agenda that seeks to remind and reassure society of their once pivotal and hegemonic role in shaping the destiny of China.

It is worth noting that Deng Xiaoping's modernization program theoretically provides Chinese intellectuals with an opportunity to fulfill such a prominent role. Modernization depends upon the expertise of technocracy and an intellectual elite who draw the blueprint for a modernizing China. In reality, however, they are well aware that their political fortune rises and falls with every shift of power within the Party. Throughout modern Chinese history, intellectuals have always held a precarious tenure under an unpredictable administration divided by contending political factions. Under Deng's regime, it is clear that the promise of professional autonomy for the intellectuals is a measure of expedience and based on the principle of utilitarianism. The political assets they have accumulated so quickly since the late 1970s could be dissolved easily. It is perhaps their awareness of the contingent nature of their power base that leads intellectuals like Su Xiaokang to lament. It is also perhaps due to the acute awareness of their own vulnerable position that a program about cultural enlightenment like Heshang is often riddled with obscure moments that reveal the intellectuals' deeply rooted obsession with power.

The flickering revelation of the ideological unconscious in Heshang portrays an anxiety-ridden elite torn between several conflicting objectives. The contradiction between what they consciously attempt to achieve and what unconsciously binds them often eclipses the possibility of a genuine cultural transformation proposed in the documentary. It points to the internal limitations of a Chinese enlightenment that is based on cultural utilitarianism, on how the past can best serve the present, on an obsession with the bygone hegemony of imperial China, on a kind of cultural determinism that seeks to reduce the pluralistic manifestations of Western civilization to a monistic totality, on its advocates' preoccupation with their own image making, on their subscription to cultural fetishism, and on a pan-Chinese nationalism. It is Su Xiaokang's weakened national self-image and his unresolved emotional ambiguity toward China's historical past that clouds the reformist vision of Heshang . Until Chinese intellectuals recognize the

precedence of individual and human welfare over national agendas and geopolitical power, the tragic homogeneity of Qin Shi Huang's terracotta warriors will continue to prevail and the reformer-intellectuals will forever mistake their superiority-inferiority nationalist complex for genuine self-reflectivity.