principles urged the Party to allow the public debates without taking an official stand on the documentary, and stressed that any Party leaders’ personal opinions toward the documentary did not represent the viewpoint of the Party as a whole. Intellectual debates The debates about Heshang were also carried on among intellectuals. 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. Some intellectuals such as Yang Zhenning and Li Zhengdao, the Nobel-Prize winners, criticized the film by pointing out that “a person [who] denies its own culture does not have a future.” In addition, criticism against Heshang stressed that the film was biased and it only represented the “elitist grumblings” (gaoji laosao). 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. It also regarded the Great Wall, the Yellow River and the Chinese dragon as isolated symbols that represented conservativeness of Chinese traditional culture in comparison with the blue sea that symbolized the superiority of western civilization. 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”. He emphasized that opening policy could not be successfully implemented, if China merely promoted economic openness without learning from western ideas and embracing cultural pluralism. Debates in Taiwan and Hong Kong In Taiwan and Hong Kong, newspapers and TV program reported the “Heshang fever” debates in P.R.China. 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. Some Taiwanese believed that the documentary was wrong to blame China’s backwardness on Confucianism. They argued that the Communist regime and its policies, rather than Confucianism, hindered the development of the nation’s modernization. For instance, critics said that Taiwan had achieved rapid development by successfully combining Confucianism