From: maghiel van crevel <M.van.Crevel@hum.leidenuniv.nl>
Source: The New Yorker (9/26/14): http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/simpsons-go-china
The Simpsons Go to China
By Hua Hsu
Later this fall, “The Simpsons” will begin streaming in China, as part of a new multi-year deal between Fox and Sohu, a minor colossus in the competitive world of Chinese Web portals. While more popular sites like Baidu and Sina have won over young users by investing in gaming and social networking, Sohu, an early pioneer on the Chinese Internet, has turned to streaming video. Partnerships with Hollywood have proved to be an effective, though scattershot, way of attracting traffic: if you license four hundred movies and TV series at once, and dump them behind a very modest paywall, some are bound to find an audience. Even a show as exotic to the typical Chinese teen-ager as “Gossip Girl” can be assured tens of thousands of devoted viewers.
The Sohu deal, announced two weeks ago, marks the first time “The Simpsons” will be nationally syndicated in China. (Al Jean, the executive producer of “The Simpsons,” quipped that the show’s writers could finally reveal that Springfield’s location is “in Guangdong province.”) But, technically speaking, this isn’t the first time “The Simpsons” has been aired in China. Television in the mainland is largely decentralized, meaning that local broadcasters enjoy a surprising degree of autonomy. “The Simpsons” could be seen in parts of China through the mid-aughts, but the series, along with other cartoons from Japan and South Korea, was barred from primetime by the government in 2006, part of a broader effort to protect and promote local Chinese animation studios.
Much has changed in the past nine years. “The Simpsons” now fits neatly alongside other faintly provocative programs, like “Modern Family” and “Saturday Night Live,” that are available through Sohu. If there was something threatening about the incursion of Western cultural and political influence ten years ago, the China of today seems a bit more confident about its standing in the world. Not that this newfound swagger has supplanted the paranoic tendencies inherent to authoritarian rule: earlier this year, as Evan Osnos wrote in an earlier post, government censors deemed the wildly popular and comparatively tame “The Big Bang Theory” unfit for consumption. It’s unclear why the series was targeted, though the show’s creator, Chuck Lorre, speculated that China’s “overlords” simply didn’t want young, impressionable Chinese citizens laughing at the series’ anti-hero “shenanigans.”
But there’s also another force at work here. America’s culture industry has never been so beholden to the rest of the world. Hollywood blockbusters like last summer’s “Transformers: Age of Extinction,” for example, have become meticulously engineered attempts to simultaneously court audiences from Peoria to Shenzhen. America once projected its democratic ethos abroad via cowboy flicks, jazz music, and edgy painting. Now cultural diplomacy gets subsumed within hat-in-hand corporate interests; before you know it, the Dinobots turn out to be Chinese. America will continue to be the world’s image factory, but this is an era of codependency. In order to function smoothly, Americans will have to look elsewhere for financing, audiences, and maybe even the token foreign heartthrob.
Will Chinese audiences—not exactly the most ironic bunch on Earth—take to the churlish sarcasm of “The Simpsons”? Or will the series’ nose-thumbing defiance seem tame at a time when many young people have skipped directly to cynical despair? Satire responds to the realization that we’ve been sold a bill of goods—that the choices we’re offered are illusory and all ultimately the same. It is a weapon of the weak, a way of critiquing the world by stepping outside of it, if only for the span of a joke. There’s a growing space for this kind of protest, as China’s fiercest Internet activists have become masters of censor-dodging puns and the authors of complex, ironic allegories for authoritarianism and surveillance. But, for most in China, the novelty of consumer choice has yet to wear off. After all, when “The Simpsons” débuted in the United States, in December, 1989, China was deep into martial law after the Tiananmen uprisings. Now “The Simpsons” will have to compete with a Chinese Internet that grows denser and more entertaining by the day. Sohu’s homepage, conforming to the aesthetics of Chinese Web design, is a frenzied riot of information. As of this past weekend, you could still find illegally uploaded (albeit grainy and un-subtitled) episodes of “The Simpsons” on Sohu’s video platform. One episode appears to have been on the site since 2010, racking up just less than five thousand views.
Of course, if recounting the global expansion of “The Simpsons” belies a sense of disappointment, it was learned from the series itself. Like all good satire, “The Simpsons” is, at its heart, deeply hopeful. American fans who grew up with the show internalized its punky disposition, its tender eviscerations of church and state, its overriding belief, stated in the words of Jebediah Springfield, that “a noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.” But, ultimately, “The Simpsons” is just a television series, and television series—even ones as respected and as globally successful as “The Simpsons”—are always interested in new audiences. Any weirdness that attends the series’ drift across the Pacific is owed to our own nostalgia rather than to what the show actually sets out to do. After all, the Simpsons remain a family. Bart is demon-like, but he never truly breaks bad; Lisa dreams of more enlightened surroundings, yet never runs away. It will be fascinating to see what, if any, aspect of “The Simpsons” ’s complex philosophy takes root in China. Maybe it will be the part about questioning authority, or the pragmatism of making compromises. Whatever happens, one hopes it won’t involve the ethos of Mr. Burns.