The film asserts that the Ming dynasty's ban on maritime activities is comparable to the building of the Great Wall by China's first emperor Ying Zheng.
[4] River Elegy (Heshang) aroused immediate debates and great controversy among intellectual circles, the Party's top leadership, and even the overseas Chinese community after its first broadcast in June 1988.
[8] Political controversy about Heshang arose and attracted attention from the Party's top leadership when a university president phoned Hu Qili, a pro-reform officer who was a member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo and the Central Secretariat, and warned him that the series might stir up student unrest.
While Zhao and Deng had supportive attitudes toward the film, a few members of the Politburo were offended by Heshang's harsh criticism of Chinese traditions and the Party's policies since 1978, as well as its attack on Leninist theories.
The deleted contents included the film's supportive attitude toward the 1986 student demonstrations and its call for the government to establish dialogue with Chinese citizens; criticism against government corruption, inflation and the CCP's ignorance of the mentally and economically impoverished situation of Chinese intellectuals; as well as criticism against the CCP's policies and its mismanagement that caused such "man-made disasters" as the 1987 great forest fires in Daxing'anling, and the 1988 Shanghai hepatitis epidemic.
At the Third Plenum of the 13th Central Committee, Wang Zhen, the then vice president, fiercely attacked Heshang by giving a long speech to criticize its "counter-revolutionary" contents.
Two major liberal newspapers, the Science and Technology Daily of Beijing and the World Economic Herald of Shanghai, sponsored a symposium to discuss issues raised in Heshang.
Positive comments mainly praised the film as a courageous work that called for the Chinese to re-examine their traditional culture in order to get rid of the ideological obstacles that hindered the nation's further development.
[16] For instance, the film wrongfully employed western criteria to judge China's social realities and attributed the country's current problems to the backwardness of its traditional culture.
In response to the criticism, Yuan Zhiming, the co-author of the sixth part of the documentary, argued that Heshang was not a scholarly work but rather a type of cultural product that aimed to call for Chinese people to "think about the historical heritage standing in the way of modernization".
People who held positive opinions toward Heshang shared the same standpoints with the ones in mainland China, whereas others criticized the film's "arbitrary" attack on Chinese traditional culture and Confucianism.
[18] After the CCP's crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, the Party criticized Heshang as one of the anti-communist work that mistakenly advocated bourgeoisie-liberal ideologies and provoked student unrest.
During a CCTV self-criticism meeting that was broadcast on the evening news across China after the June 4 crackdown, Hong Mingsheng, the vice director of Chinese Central Television, said that "'River Elegy' was a propaganda coup for bourgeois liberalization [...], it provided theoretical and emotional preparation for the recent turmoil and rebellion.