MCLC: reading into official corruption

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: reading into official corruption
***********************************************************

Source: China Economic Review (5/27/13):
http://www.chinaeconomicreview.com/reading-official-corruption-chinese-medi
a-officials-novels-tv-television-ying-zhu

Reading into official corruption
Chinese media plays to a public more cynical about corruption and wannabe
officials ever more ready to embrace it, writes Ying Zhu

Graft, gluttony and the efforts to curb both have been Chinese news
fixtures for two decades. Back in the 1990s, then-Premier Zhu Rongji
launched a series of anti-corruption campaigns that led to a number of
high-ranking officials being ousted.

The Communist Party today continues to revere Zhu for his resolve against
corruption. A recent article
<http://news.xinhuanet.com/book/2013-04/12/c_124571833.htm> in the
official communist publication Liaoning Correspondence Party School
magazine commemorated Zhu for his tough stand.

President Xi Jinping now seeks to take up Zhu’s mantle. Late last year,
after taking the top post in the party, Xi launched an austerity campaign
to rein in lavish taxpayer-financed spending by officials and state-owned
companies. While the crackdown targets conspicuous displays of wealth
among China’s elite, it does not root out  concentrations of money and
power, those that reward people with the right family pedigree and
connection.

The public, therefore, has remained skeptical of the anti-corruption
campaign. There is no shortage of online jokes mocking the renewed
moderation campaign.  “Eat quietly, take gently and play secretly” has
become the unofficial catchphrase of the corrupt.

As references to corruption and efforts to combat it permeate all of
mainland society, Chinese television has been quick to cash in by
producing TV dramas that offer up some version of righteous leaders who
lead the fight against corruption. Many of these dramas were adaptations
of anti-corruption novels that first came into vogue in the mid-1990s. The
novels frequently featured heroic party officials, professing the
uplifting message that corruption should and can be eradicated.

The loss of innocence

Several early anti-corruption dramas were modeled on former Chongqing
police chief Wang Lijun, the right-hand man of the city’s ousted party
chief Bo Xilai, who was hailed as an anti-graft hero before the scandal
that landed him in prison.

Then, in 2007, the TV series “The Great Ming Dynasty 1566” (“Daming
Wangchao 1566”) hit the airwaves and gave a more candid consideration of
official corruption. The show gave a new treatment to official corruption,
treating it as inevitable and unstoppable. “1566” offered an intriguing
look at the bureaucratic functioning of the Jiajing Emperor’s court in
which then-ruler Zhu Houcong relinquished day-to-day governance to
subordinates.

The Ming court was corrupt at all levels, which contributed to social
unrest during the Jiajing period, a period not dissimilar from the
situation in today’s China. “1556” exposed the massive and systemic
dysfunction of the Ming court and the extreme hardship ordinary people
endured during that period.

In “1566,” the shame associated with corruption is replaced by an
eagerness to partake, to be part of the privileged few with means to be
corrupt. It is Chinese television’s first drama that takes politics as is,
showcasing the nuts and bolts of political “craftsmanship” without
moralizing.

The arrival of “1566” was informed by the revival of fiction on
officialdom as a genre in the second half of the 2000s. In a new twist for
the genre, several ex- or current officials tried their hands at writing
novels that injected their real-life experiences into fictitious plots set
in the circles of power.

Wang Xiaofang, the former secretary to the executed Shenyang deputy mayor
wrote “The Mayor's Secretary” (2005) based on his experience serving in
the city of Shenyang. Wang’s “The Chief of the Beijing Liaison Office”
(2007) portrays the Shenyang liaison office in Beijing as a breeding hub
of corruption. “The Civil Servant's Notebook” (2009) reflects on the
unspoken rules governing Chinese society, lamenting the trapped lives of
civil servants.

Elite readership

Such novels have become bestsellers, serving, in a perverse way, as
manuals for China’s new generation of civil servants – they apparently
make up the largest segment of readership for officialdom novels. The
popularity of these novels implies a fascination with party politics and
arguably a desire to become part of the power elite. Wealth is
increasingly concentrated in the hands of the politically powerful and is
then handed down within a few established family dynasties, so success has
become increasingly inherited.

Not surprisingly, the exclusivity of power has only further propelled
recent college students in China to reach out to the party in hopes of
joining the elite. Research shows that the most rapidly growing members
within the CCP are now college students. They seek to join the party
because they believe that party membership will lead to job security and
social prosperity. In this fashion, as some have commented, the party has
transformed itself from the Orwellian Big Brother to a Big Brother
fraternity.

The new officialdom novels deal with the culture of Chinese officialdom,
both the trivialities of government offices and the heart-wrenching
struggles of their main characters. The works focus on the protagonist’s
compulsive abuse of power, the complexity of human relationships involved
and the struggle of those with a conscience. Here the corrupted officials
are portrayed not as villains but as major players in a larger system.

So epidemic, endemic, systemic and routine is corruption in China, the
moral indignation and the will to rectify it reflected in the
anti-corruption novels and dramas a decade have vanished.

While the anti-corruption genre tackled the issues of China’s political
culture, attempting to uncover a deep-rooted political psychology, the
officialdom novels take as a start point the inevitability of corruption
and are lavish in their detailed descriptions of crooked dealings.

The TV drama “1566” debuted against this larger social background. From
anticorruption to officialdom, the evolution of Chinese primetime TV
dramas registers the shifting mood of a Chinese society from moral
indignation to complacence and resignation, and above all, cynicism. It
remains to be seen if the party’s new round of austerity measure would
actually amount to something that is effective enough to swing the public
mood.


Ying Zhu is a professor in and chair of the Department of Media Culture at
the City University of New York, the College of Staten Island. A leading
scholar on Chinese cinema and media studies, she is the author or editor
of eight books, most recently of "Two Billion Eyes: The Story of China
Central Television."
<http://www.chinaeconomicreview.com/serving-two-masters> She is currently
working on a project concerning Sino-Hollywood courtship.