China Keywords: River Elegy and China’s Tradition of Scathing Cultural Self-Criticism

Video of the fourth webinar in the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s “China Keywords” series is now available and can be viewed here. In this webinar, Eric Hendriks talks with David Moser about China’s tradition of unsparing, sometimes hyperbolic, cultural self-criticism. This is the tradition of the democratizers of the May Fourth Movement, who rejected Confucian hierarchy; of the Red Guards, who, during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, sought to obliterate China’s traditional cultures and authority structures by force; and of the documentary series River Elegy (1988), which in the run-up to the 1989 protests claimed that conservatism and isolationism had dried up China’s cultural vitality.

David Moser is a Beijing-based linguist, academic, and public intellectual, who watched the six-part CCTV miniseries River Elegy in his dorm room at Peking University in June 1988 and witnessed it “hit academic circles like an atomic bomb.”

The Telos-Paul Piccone Institute is pleased to present this webinar in cooperation with the Danube Institute.

For more information about TPPI’s China Initiative, visit our website.