TV REVIEW : ‘After Tiananmen’: Lost in a Labyrinth

Veteran China hand Irv Drasnin has once again taken his documentary film cameras into the labyrinth of China, and has not quite found his way out. The maker of the previous “Frontline” report, “Looking for Mao,” was reportedly the first Western reporter granted broad access to the country since the June, 1989, crackdown. But “China After Tiananmen,” the 90-minute film Drasnin brought back for the PBS series, lacks much of the investigative rigor that distinguishes “Frontline” (tonight at 8, KCET Channel 28 and KPBS Channel 15; 7 p.m., KVCR Channel 24).

The security dragnet over China is supreme, and Drasnin is acutely aware of its presence. He also notes how he’s given unexpected freedom to roam streets and plazas and interview such walking nightmares of Maoism as a Baptist minister or a guy calling himself “Jeff Kafka,” in a sly slam at bureaucratic dehumanization. Everywhere, the camera records urban youth disaffected from Communist party dogma, largely because they want to make money.

Drasnin is intrigued by the fairly loose leash he seems to be on, but never speculates on the obvious: That this laxity is itself a tactic of a state that long ago mastered the art of media control. Equally obvious tests of this tactic would have been to investigate reports of mass labor camps producing export goods sold in the United States, or to seek interviews with underground radicals and reformers. Typical is Drasnin’s look at China’s film industry: While a director is shown forgetting one of the party’s “four principles” guiding a film’s ideological content, nothing is asked about the status of the remarkable filmmaker, Zhang Yimou (“Raise the Red Lantern”), who is constantly testing the state’s patience.

“China After Tiananmen” utterly loses the scent of the political outcasts, but pounces upon the seeming contradiction between a government run by aging Marxist-Leninists and a booming private economy. Symbolized by a vast marketplace ranging from street vendors to Cantonese glitter palaces, China’s economic future seems to be increasingly outward-looking even as its power structure grows inward. Drasnin, though, doesn’t examine whether the new roads to wealth ultimately serve Chinese political interests--the party’s hope that a life with creature comforts makes a life without freedom bearable.

Following “China After Tiananmen” is “Dear Frontline,” a 30-minute review of updates and viewer responses to “Frontline” reports from the last year.