cctv media events

http://ics.sagepub.com Studies International Journal of Cultural DOI: 10.1177/1367877907076786 2007; 10; 187 International Journal of Cultural Studies Wanning Sun Dancing with chains: Significant moments on China Central Television http://ics.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/10/2/187 The online version of this article can be found at: Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com can be found at:International Journal of Cultural Studies Additional services and information for http://ics.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Email Alerts: http://ics.sagepub.com/subscriptions Subscriptions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navPermissions: http://ics.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/10/2/187 Citations at National Library of China on May 3, 2010 http://ics.sagepub.comDownloaded from Dancing with chains Significant moments on China Central Television ● Wanning Sun Curtin University, Australia A B S T R A C T ● More than a decade after television became the medium of mass consumption in the West, Raymond Williams published Television: Technology and Cultural Form in 1974. Raymond Williams is interested in television not as the outcome of an isolated aesthetic adventure or technological triumph, but as the manifestation of a profoundly social process. Television arrived in China initially as both metonym and metaphor for the state’s socialist modernity, but has now also become a symptom of the triumph of global capitalism. In what way can Williams’ insights on television technology and social change be revisited and made meaningful to the socio-economic specificity of China in the reform era? By looking at some significant moments on China Central Television (CCTV) in the era of economic reforms since the 1980s, this article offers an account of the ways in which television as a form of technology plays a crucial role in the various junctures of China’s social formations. In doing so, I seek to unravel the tension and dynamism between the creative and innovative impulse of television technology as an industry, the desire of the Chinese state for hegemonic control, and the naked ambition of the global economy ushered in by the Chinese state. ● K E Y W O R D S ● CCTV ● Chinese television ● Raymond Williams ● social change ● social uses of television ● television technology In August 2005, Li Yuchun, a 21-year-old university student from Sichuan Province, achieved celebrity status overnight for winning the Mongolian Cow Sour Yogurt Super Girl Contest on Hunan Satellite TV. Watched by more than 400 million viewers, this spin-off of the hit television show American Idol A R T I C L E INTERNATIONAL journal of CULTURAL studies Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore www.sagepublications.com Volume 10(2): 187–204 DOI: 10.1177/1367877907076786 187 at National Library of China on May 3, 2010 http://ics.sagepub.comDownloaded from turned out to be one of the most-watched shows in China’s television history. Li Yuchun was selected by Time Asia as one of ‘Asia’s Heroes 2005’, and indeed her picture graces the cover of the special issue of that name. What caught the imagination of Western viewers was not so much the artistic qual- ity of Li’s performance but the fact that her rise to stardom was the result of voting by 8 million viewers rather than the judgement of a handful of panel- lists. It is not very often that ordinary Chinese people are allowed to vote, albeit only for a popular cultural idol. And it came as no surprise that the ‘supergirl’ was created not by China Central Television (CCTV), but by a provincial television station, Hunan Satellite, which has found its niche in producing purely entertaining and rowdy variety shows such as Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. That does not mean, however, that CCTV has little or nothing to claim in Chinese television’s journey towards commercialization, pluralization and liberal- ization. On the contrary, for the two decades since the start of economic reforms, CCTV, originally created as the ‘throat and tongue’ of the Chinese Communist Party and initially useful in mobilizing the population in the building of socialist modernity, has evolved into a media organization that is remarkably complex, diverse and plural in terms of its social role, institu- tional structure, programming and audience composition. Like many other institutions in post-socialist China such as education, law and finance, Chinese media not only witness and reflect the tension and dynamism between the state and the market, they have also embodied and helped shape such a relationship. CCTV, an integral part of the Chinese media, is no exception. Although it has always been state owned, supervised and controlled, for the past couple of decades CCTV, like many other state media organizations, has had to operate with gradually dwindling government funding. Driven by market forces and commercialization, the organization has had to diversify its mar- kets, funding sources and content, in order to survive and thrive as both a ‘mouthpiece’ of the state and a business enterprise. Now, with global capital rather than the state as its main source of funding, Chinese television, includ- ing CCTV, has had to become much more watchable and entertaining in order to ensure high ratings, and the consequent advertising and sponsorship dollars. Programmes and channels within the same institution are encouraged to embrace innovation and competitiveness, with the aim of producing pro- grammes to a high standard. One of the most revolutionary measures taken in the sector of cultural production in the 1990s was to abolish the previously rigid employment system. For the first time, official news organizations such as CCTV could give permission to producers to recruit their own editors and journalists from all walks of life, on a flexible contract employment system. This change in hiring practices has had profound implications. The old ‘iron- bowl system’, a permanent employment public service structure that was tied with staff members’ promotion, housing allocation and salary increases, bred conservatism, caution and laziness. In contrast, those recruited under the new 188 INTERNATIONAL journal of CULTURAL studies 10(2) at National Library of China on May 3, 2010 http://ics.sagepub.comDownloaded from contract system can expect no public-service-style benefits, but instead are rewarded for good performance alone. Among the staff of Focal Point, for example, about three-quarters are on contract, many of them young recruits with higher degrees, including some who have returned from the West (Chen, 1999). Fang Hongjin, one of Focal Point’s producers and directors, is one of these new-breed contract ‘cultural workers’ with no institutional affiliations who are now recruited by CCTV (Fang, 2000). Various measures such as this have made it difficult to maintain a totalizing state voice on all issues. As can be expected, reforms within the institutional structure of the state media have created a new space, and this is characterized by what Zhao calls a ‘multi- faceted’ relationship in which the state and the market are mutually constitu- tive of each other, and are ‘simultaneously reinforcing and undermining each other’ (Zhao, 2000: 21). More than a decade after television became the medium of mass con- sumption in the West, Raymond Williams published Television: Technology and Cultural Form in 1974. A most influential cultural historian in the 20th century whose work is associated with the emergence of cultural studies as a discipline, Williams is interested in television not as the outcome of an iso- lated aesthetic adventure or technological triumph, but as the manifestation of a profoundly social process. In his paper ‘The Technology and the Society’, Williams (2002) suggests that the relationship between television technology and social change can be approached by considering, on the one hand, the social history of television as a technology, and on the other hand, the social history of the uses of television technology. Almost a decade after Williams’ seminal work, television had established itself in urban China, and was used primarily as a tool of top-down mobilization. By the beginning of the new millennium, it had become a household item throughout the nation, both rural and urban. Seen in this light, we can say that television technology, which started in China as both metonym and metaphor for socialist moder- nity, has also become a symptom of the triumph of global capitalism. What does it mean, therefore, if we are to revisit Williams’ thinking on television and social change via the example of Chinese television? In what way can Williams’ insights on television technology and social change be made mean- ingful to the socio-economic specificity of China in the reform era? Here I propose that the answer lies in unravelling the tension and dynamism between the creative and innovative impulse of television technology as an industry, the desire of the Chinese state for Gramscian hegemonic control, and the naked ambition of the global economy ushered in by the Chinese state. It also lies in considering the impact that this tension and dynamics has on television content, formats and the (trans)formation of the social imagi- nation of Chinese audiences. By looking at some significant moments on China Central Television in the era of economic reforms since the 1980s, this article offers an account of the ways in which television as a form of technology plays a crucial role in the various junc- tures of China’s social formations. Such an account aims to demonstrate that there Sun ●● Significant moments on CCTV 189 at National Library of China on May 3, 2010 http://ics.sagepub.comDownloaded from is a reciprocal relationship between forms of representation and the society that creates them, and that each historical era produces not only its own stories but also its own ways of storytelling. Of course, a history of Chinese television can be undertaken in a number of ways – for example, by taking either a cultural analysis approach or a political economy approach. While the former might focus on representational strategies, genre, format, style and theme, the latter might consider a range of factors such as state control, finance, market, indus- try, censorship, policy, regulation, commercialization and conglomeration of Chinese television. Cognisant of the importance of both approaches and draw- ing on their respective strengths and insights, this article, however, follows its own organizing principle, of pursuing the nexus between technology and social change. It poses such questions as: how does television, now surpassed in ‘newness’ by other communication technologies such as the internet and the cell phone, continue to be ‘effective’, relevant and socially useful in a radically transformed social order? In what ways are the uses of television technology indexical to, and constitutive of, the profound changes taking place in the imagination of self, home, place, time, community and nation? In what fol- lows, I will dwell on what I consider to be some significant moments – arranged in chronological order – in CCTV’s exponential growth and devel- opment in the 1980s and 1990s. Admittedly, there is nothing inherently logi- cal or exhaustive about including these moments to form a genealogy of Chinese television in the era of economic reform, except to say that each of these televisual moments represents an innovative use of technology, not in the sense that the technology is new, but in the ways in which that technology is put to new social uses. Furthermore, each of these moments, in its own way, embodies the paradoxical relationship between television and social change. Television, seen through the prism of these moments, offers (re)new(ed) hope, yet at the same time raises further doubt about the prospects of political plu- ralism and democratization in 21st-century China. Spring Festival Eve Television Gala (1983) Television first arrived in China in 1958, but it was not until the beginning of the 1980s that it started to enter Chinese homes. For hundreds of years, the celebration of the Spring Festival, the Chinese New Year, had been a family activity, where members of families gathered together for dinner, followed by various entertainment activities such as playing cards, mah-jong or chess, or simply enjoying being together as a family. Such hermetic, family-based ways of observing the annual ritual were to change forever in 1983, when CCTV launched its first Spring Festival Eve Television Gala (chunjie lianhuan wan- hui). Consisting of singing, dancing, comedy skits (xiaopin), comedic cross- talk (xiangsheng), and other variety shows, the production – four hours in length – featured performances by the most respected and well-known Chinese artists and performers, and offered Chinese television audiences a 190 INTERNATIONAL journal of CULTURAL studies 10(2) at National Library of China on May 3, 2010 http://ics.sagepub.comDownloaded from spectacular feast of unprecedented televisual virtuosity. The event gained nationwide fame and became a success overnight, with CCTV receiving 160,000 viewers’ letters following the show. Since 1983, the Spring Festival Gala has been an annual event, although it has become increasingly difficult for the producers to satisfy audience expec- tations. The show has grown bigger and more spectacular and, at the same time, it has also become more contrived and orchestrated. Now institutional- ized as ‘part of the ritual of the New Year celebration’, the show is an inte- gral part of the Spring Festival culture itself (Zhao Bin, 1998). In 1994, the gala event was simultaneously broadcast to Chinese communities in North America and Australia. In 1997, while the production commanded a domes- tic audience of 90.67 per cent (Zhao Bin, 1998), diasporic Chinese commu- nities all over the world could also watch it via satellite. In 2005, it was broadcast all over the world in four languages including English and Spanish, thereby becoming a truly a global affair. Such a phenomenal audience size means astronomical advertising dollars during the time of the gala; hence the beginning of the tradition of manufacturers bidding – at 3 million to 10 mil- lion yuan (US$360,000–1.2 million) – for spots in the most anticipated show in the country (Martinsen, 2005). The relationship between electronic media and nation-building is well proven. Writing in the European context, Moores argues that ‘sentiments of nationhood pre-date the arrival of modern electronic media, but television and radio have nevertheless instituted new relationships between the state and the people’ (Moores, 1996: 26). In the case of Chinese television, the annual Spring Festival Gala can be seen as a ‘happy marriage between an ancient Chinese ideal and a modern Western technology, whereby happy family gath- erings are turned into “national reunions”’ (Zhao Bin, 1998: 46), and for this reason, it deserves a special place in the history of Chinese television. The secret to the initial success and the longevity of this ‘happy marriage’ lies in the show’s capacity to take advantage of the potential afforded by the technology. It demonstrates the ingenuity of the Chinese state in reinventing ways of indoctrinating and educating the nation. Delivering strong messages of patriotism and national unity but packaging them as entertainment, fun and family festivity, the gala allows the Chinese state to enter the domestic sphere of private citizens for the first time, to carry out its ideological work in the home. The synchronization of the traditional Chinese calendar with the temporality of official media ensures the ‘regular imagining’ of the nation (Mercer, 1992). As a result, domestic space can no longer be easily cordoned off or distinguished from public space. In other words, the idea of the Spring Festival Gala, conceived and started in the early 1980s, at a relatively early stage of economic reform and globalization, was one of state media’s first successful experiments with ‘indoctri-tainment’, delivering indoctrination by packaging it as entertainment (Sun, 2002a). Furthermore, if the start of the Television Gala proved the Party’s capacity to carry on ideological thought- work in the era of economic reform and market liberalization, its evolution Sun ●● Significant moments on CCTV 191 at National Library of China on May 3, 2010 http://ics.sagepub.comDownloaded from over the last two decades also showcases the Chinese state’s ambition to export patriotism outside China. In the same way that the domestic sphere is connected to the national space, national space is now connected with transnational Chinese spaces. Consequently, the ideology of patriotism not only enters the private space of the home, but also spills over to global dias- poric Chinese spaces and places. Delivered by satellite and received with a rooftop dish – affectionately dubbed a ‘wok’ by many Chinese – scores of Chinese television stations are now beamed daily into diasporic Chinese homes. Though separated by the tyranny of distance, viewers around the world can re-territorialize themselves by tuning in to the ‘comfort zone’ of the motherland. River Elegy (1988) When the six-part documentary series, River Elegy (Heshang), was screened on CCTV in 1988, nobody expected it to generate much impact. In reality, about 200 million people watched the series. It was so popular that scripts were published in full in major newspapers and in book form, to satisfy the demand. The series follows the tradition of using television to present Chinese landscape as spectacle, and in doing so, it does not deviate from the conven- tion of using visual images merely to advance a didactic message. However, rather than inscribing the landscape with ‘nationalistic affect’, as is the case with A Story of the Yangtse River (Hua Shuo Chang Jiang) and A Story of the Yunhe Canal (Hua Shuo Yun He), the images in Heshang are metaphors of the backwardness and undesirability of Chinese culture and civilization. Generalizations about Chinese culture abound, and so do essentialistic dichotomies of ‘the Chinese’ versus ‘the West’. However, the series is innov- ative and, as it turned out, controversial in at least two ways. First, it appro- priates televisual images, in particular those of civilizational glory and excellence, to construct different and, in some cases, oppositional meanings. Second, and more importantly, these national icons were translated into tele- visual images not to instil pride and confidence in the nation, but to provoke intellectual debate by casting doubt on the capacity of a Chinese cosmology to survive the inevitable processes of globalization. Juxtaposing images of the Great Wall and the Yellow River with narratives and statements about Chinese culture and civilization, the series pushed an overall argument that China needed to abandon an inland worldview for a maritime perspective (Barmé and Javin, 1992). The series deserves a special place in the history of Chinese television, because it was immensely popular, its main writers were later exiled follow- ing the Tiananmen incident in 1989, and it represents a disruptive reading of the symbols of Chinese culture. The series also made history because it was perhaps the first time when Chinese television, a medium for the masses, was used by cultural elites and for the purpose of intellectual debate. In a way, it had 192 INTERNATIONAL journal of CULTURAL studies 10(2) at National Library of China on May 3, 2010 http://ics.sagepub.comDownloaded from taught the Chinese intellectual elites a lesson about the power of televisuality, a lesson demonstrably well