MCLC: Spring Festival Gala and political theater

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Spring Festival Gala and political theater
Source: China Real Time, WSJ (2/21/15)
China’s Spring Festival Gala: Political Theater Made to Party Orders
By Ying Zhu
Attendees at a press conference for the China Central Television’s annual hours-long Spring Festival Gala. Associated Press
China Central Television’s Spring Festival gala, an annual TV extravaganza that claims higher viewership than the NFL’s Super Bowl, did not begin as the unabashed political theater that was on display during this past Lunar New Year’s eve. When the show first aired in 1983, it was an evening of rather apolitical entertainment built around the notion of “family reunion” – a refreshing and popular departure from the preceding decades of brutal political campaigns that had left lives in tatters and society exhausted.
But the gala’s immediate success proved too great a temptation for the Communist Party, which saw a golden opportunity to disseminate propaganda to a nation full of peoplewired directly via television to the central state. Starting in 1984, patriotism and solidarity became the show’s new themes, followed in recent years by national revival.
As Chinese society has grown more complex, the party’s valuation of the gala as a means of communicating with the masses has increased. Late last year, the gala was accorded “national project” status, a political significance given previously only to the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony. The elevation translates to stricter party oversight. Programing the gala has now become more hazardous than walking a tightrope.
The challenge CCTV, China’s state broadcaster, faces in producing the gala is illustrated by the experience of Feng Xiaogang, an irreverent film director who tried his hand at directing the gala last year. Feng, one of the most influential figures in Chinese film, was recruited to bring a popular touch to the annual ritual, which had lost its appeal particularly among the sophisticated young urbanites with little loyalty to the tradition or the network. But his talent was straightjacketed by party directives. As he later lamented, the show was made to please party leaders, not ordinary viewers.
The gala has over the years developed a formula that weaves party sanctioned political directives into an exuberantly festive line-up of songs, dances, comedy skits, martial arts, magic tricks, acrobatics and Chinese traditional opera. The gala promotes a party-sanctioned theme each year.
Ethnic harmony is a constant motif, with ethnic minorities performing song and dance numbers in traditional clothing every year. Occasionally, these displays backfire, as when the show was lambasted for trotting out a Uighur performer to sing “The Party’s Policies are Good” in 2010, less than a year after deadly ethnic riots erupted in the capital of the Uighur homeland of Xinjiang. The gala producers were savvier this year, giving one of the show’s highly coveted host slots to a Uighur, Negmat Rahman, a Beijing-educated TV personality who speaks pitch-perfect Mandarin and stands as a shining example of the Chinese model minority.
The specific political agenda for this year was to propagate Chinese President Xi Jinping’s anti-graft and cultural cleansing campaign. Cross-talks and comedy skits shamed corrupt officials and repudiated morally suspect social practices, though without much success.
The first time CCTV’s Spring Festival gala spotlighted corruption was in 1988, when a cross-talk routine satirized a small-time section chief who cooked up a scheme to use public fund for a Peking duck feast. Though equipped with much juicier material for graft offenses, Wednesday night’s skits fell flat. Particularly tone-deaf was a routine called “Network Circle” that attempted to make fun of the habitual tendency among Chinese people to seek short-cuts through exchanges of favors. Ordinary people in the audience, many of them no doubt victimized by this form of petty corruption, responded with only lukewarm applause.
This year’s gala was one of the most unabashedly propagandistic in recent memory, with overt political messages not so much artfully woven in as bluntly shouted out. The broadcast was punctuated throughout by references to the “China Dream,” a key catch phrase in Xi’s campaign to “rejuvenate” China. Also emphasized was the important role national security plays in realizing that dream, as illustrated by images of military forces saluting the party and a profusion of skits portraying altruistic police and soldiers.
Significantly, this year’s gala also marked a return to the cult of personality – something China has not witnessed since the end of the Mao Zedong era. In one of the show’s biggest moments, Xi, China’s new great helmsman, was celebrated with a brand new song, “I Give You My Heart,” which was accompanied by a video montage showcasing Xi’s efforts in serving the people.
In its first year as a national project, the CCTV Spring Festival gala felt tentative, laborious, and somehow both over- and half-baked at the same time.  In years past, even when it has disappointed, the gala has managed to play to people’s warm feelings about family and, by extension, the party. The collective ritual of watching gala over a family reunion meal has become one of the most stabilizing forces in Chinese society. No matter how bad things might get, CCTV reassures the country, we will always have the gala, and the party. But it is doubtful, though, that audiences will come to the party’s table for much longer if the gala continues to prize leaders’ satisfaction over viewers’ pleasure.
Ying Zhu is professor of Chinese Media and Society at the City University of New York
by denton.2 at osu.edu on February 21, 2015
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