By Ying Zhu

Faced with a slowing economy and mounting public frustration over corruption, China's new leadership has signaled plans to reduce state control in economic matters while simultaneously tightening control over politics and ideology. That bifurcation between economic liberalization and political repression is reminiscent of an earlier era, when economic uncertainty coupled with the party's failure to tackle official corruption and refusal to allow a more liberal political climate led to the 1989 student uprising.

The connection between China's current predicament and the 1989 demonstrations -- which ended, 24 years ago today, in a bloody assault by Chinese troops on unarmed civilians in the heart of Beijing -- occurred to me recently when I was tasked with connecting the dots between two films for a Chinese Independent Documentary Film Retrospective at the MOMA here in New York.

The first was "River Elegy," an iconic six-part TV documentary series denouncing Chinese tradition as the cause of a repressive party orthodoxy that ran on China Central Television in 1988. The second film was "iMirror," a less well-known but still striking 30-minute experimental video produced at the height of China's economic boom in 2007.

"River Elegy" was a national sensation when it was released. As the name suggests, the documentary was an elegy for China's Yellow River, seen as the symbol of an ancient civilization that had dried up in modern times as a result of isolation and conservatism. The film equated the Yellow River's age-old silt and sediment with the dead weight of Confucian traditions and consequent Chinese cultural stagnation, arguing that China needed to exchange its inward- and backward-looking, land-based civilization for an outward- and forward-looking, ocean-bound civilization modeled on the West.