MCLC: China's cultural war

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: michael keane (m.keane at qut.edu.au)
Subject: China's cultural war
***********************************************************

Source: Asian Creative Transformations (4/2/12):
http://www.creativetransformations.asia/2012/04/the-cultivated-and-the-vulg
ar-chinas-cultural-war/

The Cultivated and the Vulgar: China's Cultural War
By Ying Zhu, author of Two Billion Eyes: The Story of China Central
Television
(forthcoming, New York: New Press)

In October 2011 Chinese authorities banned scores of racy and overtly
materialistic entertainment shows on primetime television. Within days
Western media were abuzz with speculation on China's tightening cultural
policy. I received a fair amount of questions from deadline-chasing
journalists soliciting my "expert" opinions on the "crackdown."
Unsurprisingly, the official Chinese line of "curbing excessive
entertainment" is met with dismissive skepticism.

A Chinese dating show, If You Are the One is frequently cited as an
example of "excessive entertainment" [1]. In this program provocatively
dressed young women publicly embrace materialism, opting for wealth and
affluence over romance and relationships, all of which evidently defies
traditional Chinese morality. This and similar shows featuring material
girls, and boys, have overwhelmed old party comrades, conservative
cultural commentators, and viewers who believe that such programming
constitutes the increasing vulgarity and cultural degradation of Chinese
television.

In 2011 new rules were issued that forced 34 satellite stations across
China cut vulgar entertainment programs. Under the new rules, each
television station can broadcast only two entertainment shows during prime
time each week, and each is expected to broadcast at least one show that
promotes traditional Chinese virtues and core socialist values.

The apparent "harsher" turn on entertainment has alarmed some China
observers, who see the tightening as signs of China retreating to a more
militant past. The intrigue keeps China in the news, as if there weren't
enough news about China already, including the recent Chinese Vice
President Xi Jinping's US visit and the dismissal of Bo Xilai as CCP
secretary of Chongqing municipality and a potential member of the Party's
Politburo Standing Committee.

To crack the China code, a bit of historical perspective is in order. The
subservience of media to politics remains China's official ideology today.
Such an ideology is not entirely the invention of the Chinese Communist
Party--it is rooted in a longer tradition of Chinese aesthetics that
defines art (and entertainment). According to Chinese aesthetics art is
meant to represent the 'good and the beautiful.' This perspective can be
traced to a moral and ethical fabric grounded in Confucianism.

Cultural policy in China has been interventionist since the Chinese
Communist Party established the League of Left Wing Writers in 1930.
Cultural centralization and homogenization were the result of Chinese
cultural policy. This is not to establish a hoary adage, but rather to
acknowledge a greater relative emphasis, compared to Western traditions of
art as a critical vanguard-the responsibility of art in the normalization
of society.

In China, entertainment is supposed to teach moral lessons instead of
pushing cultural/artistic boundaries or expanding markets. Thus the
Chinese state is constantly waging a cultural war against Western
influence. A speech delivered by China's President Hu Jintao at the annual
plenum of the party's Central Committee in 2011 reasserted the party's
control on culture and ideological affairs and efforts to fend off Western
Culture pollution [2]. The battle against Western popular culture is
equated with ensuring what the Party likes to call "cultural security".

With Avatar dominating the Chinese box office in 2011 and Lady Gaga
becoming a popular icon among Chinese youth, a prevailing sense of
cultural anxiety among Chinese cultural guardians echoes Hu's assertion
that "The West is trying to dominate China by spreading its culture and
ideology and that China must strengthen its cultural production to defend
against the assault" [3]. Pitting Chinese culture against Western culture,
Hu declared that an escalating culture war between the two sides has begun.

Published in the party magazine Seeking Truth, certain passages in Hu's
speech register a cold war tone. Hu urges Chinese cultural policy makers
to "clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the
strategic plot of westernizing and dividing China, and ideological and
cultural fields are the focal areas of their long-term infiltration... We
should deeply understand the seriousness and complexity of the ideological
struggle, always sound the alarm and remain vigilant and take forceful
measures to be on guard and respond." The apparent militancy of Hu's
speech and the ensuing new rules on Chinese prime time television are
reminiscent of cultural cleansing movements during the earlier CCP era.

"The overall strength of Chinese culture and its international influence
is not commensurate with China's international status," as Hu puts it. He
encourages the development of a Chinese national culture rooted in
Confucian tradition capable of countering Western cultural influence.

Now as the influence of communist ideology withers, the Chinese state is
resorting to Confucianism in its reconstruction of "national culture." The
Chinese state is not alone in this. The effort to revive Confucianism and
Classical Chinese learning is nothing new among traditionalist Chinese
scholars and cultural commentators. Over the past decade or two they have
actively participated in ritual recitation of the Classics, exhorting
traditional private schools to soak up on traditional Chinese virtues and
values.

Responding to the demand for learning the Classics in elementary
education, Chinese universities have begun to train scholars of Confucian
Classics. The first College of Chinese Classics was inaugurated in 2005 at
the People's University in Beijing. The revival of Confucianism at the
grassroots among the traditionalists has paved the way for the state's
call on an all out cultural war against decadent Western culture.

However, the Chinese versus Western rhetoric in Hu's charge of amoral
Western influence is deceptive, or at least misguided. The current
cultural clash is not China versus the West but an envisioned
nationalistic high culture versus the vernacular pop culture ushered in by
a market economy. The real clash is therefore between the mandate of a
cultural tradition dictated by morality and the demand of a market system
dictated by profit maximization.

The paternalistic Chinese cultural guardians have yet to come to terms
with the reality that pop culture is the logical extension of a market
economy, which the Chinese state has embraced. Instead of blaming the West
for eroding its cultural mores, China needs to take ownership of its
self-inflicted cultural dilemma. The cultural war is internal, between
China's own vernacular and the genteel, both ignoring the discredited
propaganda culture.

The moral panic registered by the Chinese over vulgar content on its
national television is no different from what the FCC chairman Newton
Minow registered in 1961 as he referred to American commercial television
programming as a "vast wasteland" and advocated for programming in the
public interest. With morally challenging reality shows of all sorts on
the rise on US television, the Chinese better brace themselves for what is
yet to come.

The current cultural tightening in China is the continuation of a top-down
project propelled by political needs, yet it does reflect an organic,
bottom-up response to Chinese society's loss of moral grounding. Viewed in
this light, the recent ideological and cultural tightening in China is
symptomatic of the ambivalent march towards a market economy.
Historically, the infiltration of the market and its profit logic into
every fabric of a society has triggered society's protective mechanism in
preserving its social and cultural integrity, through means of state
legislation and other forms of societal intervention. In addition to the
often-highlighted Chinese state intervention, what we witness in China is
also a spontaneous moral response to the shocks of a free market that
threatens to tear apart China's moral fabric.

Obviously the tightening up cannot last long when the bottom line is at
stake. Some speculate that the top-down tightening up is symptomatic of
the state-commerce cronyism rooted in China's television structure in
which the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), the
state agency regulating the industry, is financially linked to China
Central Television (CCTV), the only national network that serves as the
party's mouthpiece. CCTV's market share has been eroded over the years by
entertainment shows on provincial television. Yet CCTV remits a fraction
of its annual revenue to SARFT. Indeed, SARFT has been consistently
criticized for suppressing attempts by provincial TV stations to expand
regionally and nationally, thereby securing the network's national
monopoly.

As I trace in my forthcoming book, "Two Billion Eyes: The Story of China
Central Television," the overnight sensation of a singing competition
show, Super Girls, from a provincial TV station in 2004 sent a shockwave
through CCTV's leadership, which promptly denounced the show as "a rogue
program" produced by "the rogue broadcaster." [4]

Feeling the heat for becoming increasingly irrelevant to the masses,
especially the youth it was mandated to reach and unify, CCTV aired a
story in June 2005 to criticize the prevalence of entertainment shows
modeled on foreign programs and their detrimental impact on Chinese
society. On July 19, 2005, CCTV sponsored a much publicized industry
summit attended by top propaganda officials and television hosts from
major broadcasters around the country. Three of its anchor hosts spoke at
the summit and criticized Super Girls for being vulgar and condemned
ratings as "the source of all evil." Wang Taihua, general director of
SARFT, complained that there were too many low-quality and lowbrow reality
shows that cater to the least common denominator and that the government
must strengthen supervision of entertainment programs and restrict the
number of reality shows allowed on TV [5]. CCTV pledged to adhere to its
vocation of "spreading advanced culture" and "actively advocate mainstream
values in line with the times."

In private, the network lobbied the central propaganda department to cramp
down on the show. The SARFT announced a ban on airing talent shows during
prime time (between 7:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m.) starting in October 2007.
Under the new rules, the programs must be no more than 90 minutes, and
offer no prizes to attract contestants. After a year of siesta in 2008
when the Beijing Olympic Games preempted all other events, Hunan TV made
an attempt to re-launch Super Girls under a different name, Happy Girls,
in 2009. Hunan TV submitted to SARFT conditions that Happy Girls would
only last for two months and each episode would air only after 10:30pm.
The draconian directives of the SARFT were astonishingly amusing: judges
must hold themselves to some decorum; publicity revolving around the
private lives of contestants is banned; and text-based and online voting
systems are no longer allowed; Finally, competitors are forbidden from
hugging each other or expressing extreme emotions on stage, and no fan
groups are allowed to cheer for contestants in the studio. As my
12-year-old daughter puts it, "This is ridiculous. A reality show is all
about the instant display of raw emotions."

As CCTV condemned Super Girls, it aggressively launched its own talent
quest show, Dream China, in 2005, and entrusted Li Yong, CCTV's king of
pop culture as its host. Li later claimed in his interview with me that
the idea of Dream China came before Super Girls and that Hunan TV could
not possibly measure up in market share and cultural influence to CCTV. To
show national unity, Hunan TV took great pains to drive home the point
that Hunan TV and CCTV are not enemies. The point was delivered to me
during my interview with top-level policy makers at Hunan TV in July 2009.
While asked if CCTV has attempted to create hurdles for Hunan TV, I was
told that "the rules are handed down by SARFT, although people do link
CCTV with SARFT."

TV remains the party's most manageable vehicle for cultural engineering
yet even the Chinese state can't control consumer behavior. The tightened
regulations will only convert more TV viewers into web surfers, as the
younger generation has already turned to the Internet for entertainment
programs. By the end of 2012, the number of Chinese watching entertainment
programs online is tipped to surpass 445 million [6]. Finally, the cycle
of cultural tightening and loosening up is nothing new in China; moreover
as the Chinese put it, "For every measure from the top, there are
strategies to sidestep it."

So allow me remind the Chinese policy makers and cultural pundits that
Western culture is not the real culprit in the withering of China's high
culture as marketization and globalization have pushed open the Pandora
box of the vernacular. A reminder to my alarmed fellow Western observers
that the recent crackdown should not come as a surprise and that not all
policy moves by the CCP signal a political and cultural Tsunami. Let's all
chill a bit.

NOTES:

1 Edward Wong, "China TV Grows Racy, and Gets a Chaperon" New York
Times(1/1/12)
2 David Bandurski, "All in favor of culture, say "Aye" China Media Project
(10/26/11)
3 Edward Wong, "China's President Lashes Out at Western Culture" New York
Times (1/4/12)
4 Yong Zhong (2007) "Competition is getting real in Chinese TV: A moment
of confrontation between CCTV and HSTV," Media International Australia,
no. 124, August, pp. 68-82
5 Peter Feuilherade (2007), "China threatens reality TV crackdown" BBC
Monitoring (January 16)
6 "How Youku is helping China's film-makers get round the censors" The
Guardian (1/24/12)

AUTHOR BIO: Ying Zhu is a professor of media culture at the City
University of New York, College of Staten Island. She is the author and
editor of seven books, including "Chinese Cinema during the Era of Reform:
the Ingenuity of the System" and "Television in Post-Reform China: Serial
Drama, Confucian Leadership and Global Television Market." Her co-produced
documentary, "Google China Standoff" aired on the Netherlands National
Television in 2011, receiving wide attention.





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