Consciousness of Sorrow and Worry and the National Pedagogy of Reform

River Elegy(Heshang)is a Chinese TV documentary aired on Chinese Central Television(CCTV)in 1988.Its provocative condemnation of the thousand-year-old'yellow civilization'(huangse wenming黄色文明)of China stirred up a tornado of controversies among Chinese audiences.Intense debates and reflections on the documentary both inside and outside China have made Heshang one of the most intriguing'phenomena'in contemporary Chinese culture.This paper proposes a new perspective to read Heshang,tackling it as a historically situated narrative that embodies a post-Mao intellectual discourse of the national sentiment.In the new context of post-Mao China,what does Heshang tell of the relative positionalities of the intellectuals,the masses,and the state in the frame of Chinese modernity?How do we dialectically understand the documentary’s national pedagogy of reform in relation to the elusive agency of the low-quality Chinese masses?With these questions in mind,I revisit Heshang’s claim of weak political agency as an embodiment of low people quality.I argue that the national sentiment of the consciousness of sorrow and worry(忧患意识)simultaneously suggests and subverts the national pedagogy of reform promoted by the Heshang intellectuals.