Source: China Real Time, WSJ (2/19/15)
Xi Jinping the Star in China’s Lunar New Year Gala
By Josh Chin
A screenshot shows the performance of “I Give My Heart to You” during this year’s China Central Television Spring Festival gala.
With the Lunar New Year drawing near, China’s state broadcaster used one of its most tightly managed and overtly political Spring Festival galas in recent memory to deliver a message to the country’s 1.3 billion people on behalf of the Communist Party: Our hearts are yours.
A four-hour jumble of songs, skits, lavish costumes and gravity-defying hair-dos piped into living rooms across China every Lunar New Year’s eve, China Central Television’s Spring Festival gala is one of the world’s most-watched broadcasts. The show – equal parts entertainment and propaganda – reached more than 700 million viewers in 2014, according to CCTV, in what was considered a down year.
It wasn’t immediately clear how many tuned into Wednesday night’s broadcast.
Even if many viewers only keep it on in the background as they eat dinner or play cards, such a large audience makes the show an irresistible vehicle for the delivery of political messages. The proportion of political content has waxed and waned over the years, but with Chinese President Xi Jinping eager to tighten the Communist Party’s grip on public discourse, the messages this year were clear.
For the first time, the gala featured a host from the majority Muslim Uighur ethnic minority, Negmat Rahman, whose appearance helped reinforce a message of ethnic unity following a year of escalating violence in the Uighur homeland of Xinjiang. A number of skits and songs addressed the lives of the ordinary people, who were also featured prominently in the studio audience, recalling Mr. Xi’s “mass line” campaign urging officials to better understand regular folk.
The gala was also notable for featuring a pair of comedy routines dealing with corruption – an unusually sensitive topic for the show, but one that dovetails with Mr. Xi’s wide-ranging anti-corruption drive.
“Some irony or scoffing at corruption cases in an innocuous way would resonate with the public,” the state-run China Daily newspaper quoted Peking University political scientist Yan Jirong as saying.
The most overt message, however, was delivered roughly three hours into the program with a soaring political love song titled “I Give My Heart To You,” illustrated with a video montage of Mr. Xi meeting citizens and soldiers in spots around the country.
“My motherland, my brothers and sisters/I give my heart to you,” Hong Kong tenor Warren Mok sang as images flashed in the background showing Mr. Xi planting trees, shaking hands with residents in an old Beijing alley and stomping through the snow to greet soldiers on China’s northern border.
Although the Spring Festival gala is always tightly managed, this year’s edition was even more so, according to state media and CCTV staff. The show was given the status of a “national project,” on par with the Beijing 2008 Olympics, and organizers were quoted as saying the show was being planned according to “three no’s”: No vulgar content, no low-brow content and no artists with histories of drug use or other personal problems.
Propaganda officials, who typically sit in only on the last Spring Festival gala rehearsals, monitored every rehearsal for this year’s show and cancelled a number of acts deemed to be “too entertaining,” according to a CCTV staff member with knowledge of the gala’s production.
Despite, or maybe because of, the heavy hand, the show came in for criticism from viewers, many of whom went online to complain that some of the acts – particularly the anti-corruption comedy routines – were unusually boring. The show also sparked heated criticism on social media sites over skits that many viewers thought were demeaning to women, including one in which two men attempt to educate an unemployed and boyfriend-less “tomboy” by trotting out a leggy “goddess” for her to mimic.
“You see?” asks one of the men when the model walks out on stage. “This is what elegance is.”
“The moral direction of state media and the party is abundantly clear. Even my father couldn’t watch it,” wrote one user on the Weibo microblogging site.
Such criticism isn’t unusual. The Spring Festival gala, like the Academy Awards, derives much of its cultural cachet from the joy viewers take in complaining about it. Likely more worrying for CCTV was the greater interest many viewers seemed to show in a promotional give-away the broadcaster organized in conjunction with the WeChat instant messaging service. The campaign — which required users to shake their phones at specific moments during the broadcast for a chance to win virtual packets of Lunar New Year money, or hongbao – left some viewers complaining of elbow pain the day after the broadcast.
“This is the Spring Festival Gala in the 21st century,” one friend of China Real Time’s observed Thursday night. “The show is on the TV, but everyone is looking at their phones.”
– Josh Chin, with contributions from Lilian Lin