MCLC: CCTV new year gala

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CCTV new year gala
Source: Sinosphere, NYT (2/3/15)
CCTV Appoints Hosts for Lunar New Year Gala, With Some Surprises
By Jess Macy Yu
Lunar New Year celebrations in China are typically marked by travel back home, dumplings with family members and, on New Year’s Eve, the Spring Festival Gala on China Central Television.
The state broadcaster, known as CCTV, has announced the long-awaited names of the eight people who will serve as hosts of this year’s gala, which is expected to draw at least 700 million viewers and is the world’s most watched entertainment show.
One of the presenters is Zhu Jun, who has held the role for the past 18 galas. He will be joined by Dong Qing, a television hostess who attracted national attention last year for giving birth in the United States, and Kang Hui, a well-known television news anchor.
CCTV also announced on Monday that for the first time, one of the presenters would be an ethnic Uighur — Negmat Rahman, the host of the popular television quiz show “Happy Dictionary.”
A video of last year’s CCTV Spring Festival Gala, ushering in the Year of the Horse.
The decision to invite a Uighur — a member of the Turkic-speaking, mostly Muslim ethnic group native to the western region of Xinjiang — to the Spring Festival Gala stage has drawn considerable comment online. Some have speculated that the choice was made in part to project a smooth relationship with Xinjiang, which has been beset by ethnic tensions and sometimes deadly violence in recent years.
The gala’s theme is “Family Harmony Yields Success,” and CCTV said that both family and national unity would be illuminated in dramatic sketches and comedy shorts. But if the national unity narrative is a predictable feature of the annual television event, the selection of hosts in 2015 was far less so.
For weeks, speculation over who would make the final cut was fueled by scandals involving several entertainment celebrities, including Jaycee Chan, the son of the action movie star Jackie Chan. Jaycee Chan was sentenced to six months in prison on a drug charge.
Among the surprises in CCTV’s announcement was that Zhou Benshan, a comedian and former gala host, would not appear this year, even though his skits had long been a staple of the show. The state news media has reported that Mr. Zhou, whose flamboyant lifestyle has not fit well with President Xi Jinping’s anticorruption campaign and whose jokes have often targeted farmers and the elderly, has also seen his television programs suspended.
Discussing preparations for the gala, Hu Zhanfan, the CCTV director, recently said that the show would avoid displaying a “low style” and would not invite “actors with stains or moral misdeeds” to participate.
In October, Mr. Xi convened a meeting of prominent Chinese cultural figures at which he delivered a speech emphasizing that the arts should foster patriotism and correct viewpoints of history, nationality and culture. CCTV subsequently announced that it would ban all artists with criminal or drug records from the Spring Festival Gala, despite criticism by some that this would violate Chinese law prohibiting job discrimination against people undergoing treatment for illicit drug use.
Exactly what effect the recent ideological tightening will have on this year’s show remains to be seen. If the past serves as a reference point, the gala could take a relatively nonpolitical stance, as it did in 2011, when it broke with precedent and cut out images of national leaders. Or it could dart back to the heavily politicized galas of 2007 and 2008.
The galas have often glorified top Communist Party leaders, such as Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. In 2007 and 2008, however, the shows went so far as to display the entire Politburo Standing Committee.
Whether the messages of the continuing anticorruption campaign will inform this year’s staging and performances will become clear when the curtain rises on the evening of Feb. 18. Behind the scenes, the drive has already had an effect: CCTV has indicated that there will be no ads for expensive liquors or gold coins this year, and that an inspection team has been set up to ensure that no state funds are misappropriated.
by denton.2 at osu.edu on February 3, 2015
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