He shangand the paradoxes of Chinese enlightenment

Abstract

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 had inspired the Tang poet Wang Zhihuan with such immediacy and aesthetically engaged tranquillity, is turned into a haunting image of ambivalence in the final climactic moments of He shang (Yellow River elegy). Does the physical landscape of such an encounter tell the story of the voluntary submission of the river to the ocean, as many Chinese Communist Party (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 casts the merger into 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, while 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 He shang 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.