The television miniseries He shang (River elegy) was produced in 1988, when much of the Chinese public was growing restive with economic instability and unprecedented inflation. As further economic and political reforms appeared stalled in quarrels among national leaders, public perception focused on the official corruption and nepotism that was monopolizing the new avenues of opportunity that had supposedly been opened up to the society at large by the recent reforms. Censorship of public expression was increasingly relaxed across a broad range of social and aesthetic topics, yet prominent intellectuals within the party who criticized the political system too directly were still being stripped of their party memberships and appointments within party-state cultural institutions. There was a widely repeated notion of a nation potentially in crisis, with consequent opportunities for either bold innovative improvements or fateful miscalculations for the worse. He shang brought to the rapidly expanding medium of Chinese television a vision of this crisis, and it represents the work of China's new generation of academic cultural critics and writers of reportage literature (baogao wenxue). The production may have been rushed and the footage pieced together from other projects, and thoughtful viewers may not have found answers to all the questions raised by the script, yet the miniseries was a showpiece of what was new in television, in cultural criticism, and in the nonfiction writing of literary reportage. The offense He shang gave some leaders (such as Wang Zhen, who condemned it), and the comfort the program gave others (such as Zhao Ziyang, who praised it) helped mark every major participant in the He shang project for state retribution a year later, when the power of Zhao Ziyang's patronage collapsed and the collaborators in the He shang production demonstrated their support for the democratic movement.