Television

Wuhan as star in propaganda push

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Source: NYT (11/6/20)
As China’s Propaganda Push Continues, Wuhan Emerges as a Star
New television shows have paid tribute to the city where the coronavirus emerged, focusing on residents’ heroism and glossing over official mistakes.
By Vivian Wang

The opera “Angel’s Diary” in Wuhan, China, last month. Credit…Getty Images

They came out one after another, with flourishes and fanfare. A six-hour documentary series, showing the “heroic deeds of party members” and Wuhan’s “warriors in white coats.” A star-studded, 20-part drama, fictionalizing Wuhan’s doctors, delivery drivers and construction workers. Another pandemic show, set to swelling choral music, that viewers said left them choked with tears.

Wuhan, once synonymous with the devastation that the coronavirus could wreak, has become the subject of glowing paeans across Chinese media, lauded by officials as a symbol of the country’s resilience in the outbreak’s aftermath.

Propaganda agencies have churned out the television tributes to the city, where the outbreak first emerged, while the national Ministry of Culture and Tourism sponsored a new opera about its doctors. State news outlets have emphasized a rush of tourists to Wuhan, and at least one hospital recently welcomed business executives for a tour. Continue reading →

Covid TV drama draws ire over depiction of women

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Source: NYT (9/20/20)
A TV Drama on China’s Fight With Covid-19 Draws Ire Over Its Depiction of Women
A scene from a state-sponsored show extolled men who volunteered but played down women’s contributions. Internet users are calling for the show to be pulled from the air.
By Vivian Wang

Nurses during a ceremony marking International Nurses Day at a hospital in Wuhan, China. More than 90 percent of the nurses deployed to Wuhan at the height of the coronavirus outbreak were women. Credit…Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The scene came seven minutes into a new Chinese-government-sponsored television drama, so short that it would have been easy to miss: The head of a bus company in Wuhan, the city where the coronavirus outbreak began, asks his drivers if they are willing to make emergency runs during the city’s lockdown. A line of volunteers forms. None are women.

That roughly minute-long clip has set off a furor on Chinese social media. Users have called the scene — in which the official then asks why no women have stepped up — a flagrant example of sexism in Chinese society and an attempt to erase women’s contributions to the fight against the virus. In reality, women made up the majority of front-line workers during the crisis, according to the official news media.

By Sunday, a hashtag about that segment, which aired on Thursday, had been viewed more than 140 million times. Tens of thousands of people had called for the show to be taken off the air. Continue reading →

Fantasy and the Forbidden City

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Source: China Channel, LARB (2/4/20)
Fantasy and the Forbidden City
China’s most popular costume drama tells more about the present than it does about the Qing dynasty – Tobie Meyer-Fong
By Tobie Meyer-Fong

Story of Yanxi Palace

During the summer of 2018, The Story of Yanxi Palace (延禧攻略), a soap opera set in the Forbidden City, mesmerized audiences with its sumptuous costumes and lavish sets. Media analysts celebrated the protagonist – a concubine rising within the ranks – as a bold female exemplar, and noted that it provided a promising vehicle for education about China’s cultural heritage both at home and abroad. The show was made and initially screened by iQiyi, a Chinese internet streaming company owned by Baidu, although it was later also broadcast on conventional and cable television channels. (A version with English subtitles can be found on YouTube.) It proved hugely popular, with episodes streamed over 15 billion times by Chinese viewers. The BBC online breathlessly announced that Yanxi Palace was the “most Googled TV show of 2018 globally,” even though Google is blocked in China. Continue reading →

Spring festival gala a “huge success”

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Source: Sup China (2/6/19)
CCTV Claims This Year’s Spring Festival Gala Was A Huge Success — I Call It BS
By JIAYUN FENG

Chinese state broadcaster CCTV released a report on the morning of February 6 summarizing how the 2019 Spring Festival Gala performed in terms of viewership and audience response.

The report gives the official narrative of this year’s rendition of the show, which began in 1983 and has often been the world’s biggest television event by audience numbers. To absolutely no one’s surprise, but in apparent contradiction to much of the snark about it on Chinese social media, the 2019 gala was allegedly “record-breaking” and has received overwhelmingly positive feedback.

According to the report (in Chinese), the show attracted a staggering 1.17 billion viewers across the globe. That’s up around 4 percent compared with the 2016 gala, which had 1.13 billion viewers. Meanwhile, CCTV noted that around 96.98 percent of all the online comments about the show are positive, which made this year’s gala one of the most well received editions in recent years. Continue reading →

Reality show slammed for gender stereotypes

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Source: Sixth Tone (1/30/19)
Chinese Reality Show Slammed for Reinforcing Gender Stereotypes
“My Little One” preaches the importance of marriage and traditional gender roles to the single female celebrities starring in the program.
By Li You

A screenshot from the reality TV program “My Little One” shows celebrity actress Yuan Shanshan with two dogs.

A reality television show has become the target of feminist fury after portraying several Chinese celebrities as spinsters and urging them to get married.

Though “My Little One” was intended to give viewers a peek into the personal lives of celebrities, it has largely devolved into preaching to its female stars about outmoded gender roles. Since the premiere of the second season on Jan. 5 on state-owned Hunan Satellite TV, the show casts a spotlight on TV personality Wu Xin, swimmer Fu Yuanhui, trampoline gymnast He Wenna, and actress Yuan Shanshan for remaining single. Continue reading →

Top reality show of 2018: Dunk of China

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Source: The World of Chinese (12/27/18)
Top Reality Show of 2018: Dunk of China
The smash-hit variety show combined basketball with pop culture to lure millions into watching
By Eduardo Baptista (苏昂)

As 2019 approaches, so does the usual array of lists and round-ups for the dwindling year. In the spirit of variety, The World of Chinese has endeavored to chronicle the countdowns that others don’t. Try elsewhere (or, indeed, everywhere) for your everyday 2018 listicles—here you will find the stories, characters and pratfalls that the rest of the English-language media has largely overlooked.

“A basketball variety show?” recalls Zhu Mingzhen, a 22-year old finalist in the first season of Dunk of China, a web-based reality series which aired on Youku.com between August 25 and November 1. “It sounded like a scam to me.”

The pairing of judges [and singers] Jay Chou and Li Yifeng, though, along with CBA star Guo Ai Lun and revered Taiwanese-American NBA player Jeremy Lin would earn Dunk of China an 8.4 rating on Douban for its first season. Zhu reckons Chou and Li’s participation “converted a lot of Chinese girls into basketball fans.” Continue reading →

Story of Yanxi Palace as evidence of “one China”

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Source: SCMP (9/27/18)
Taiwanese, mainland Chinese are ‘one family’, and television drama show proves it, official says
Success of The Story of Yanxi Palace evidence of people’s ‘shared culture’, Taiwan Affairs Office spokesman says, but others reckon it’s just a good romp
By Laurie Chen

Since its premiere on July 19, episodes of The Story of Yanxi Palace have been viewed more than 100 million times in Taiwan. Photo: Handout

Despite the current troubled state of relations between Beijing and Taipei, the popularity of a Chinese period drama among television and online audiences in Taiwan is evidence of the “shared culture” of people living on either side of the Taiwan Strait, at least according to a mainland-based official.

Since its premiere on July 19, the 70 episodes that make up The Story of Yanxi Palace – which tells the tale of a group of concubines to the 18th-century Chinese Emperor Qianlong – have been viewed more than 100 million times in Taiwan, according to figures from online streaming platform iQiyi. Continue reading →

Fraudulent TV ratings

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Source: SupChina (9/25/18)
Director Exposes Chinese TV’s Fraudulent Ratings
By PANG-CHIEH HO

Fan Bingbing, Feng Xiaogang, and tax evasion aren’t the only stories currently stirring up a storm in China’s entertainment sector. On September 15, Chinese director and screenwriter Jingyu Guo 郭靖宇 created a furor when he exposed on Weibo the prevalence of fraudulent ratings in China’s TV industry.

According to Guo, it is common practice for TV producers to “buy” fake ratings. The current rates go for around 900,000 RMB ($131,000) per episode, as he learned last year when he was approached by representatives to bolster the ratings of his show Mother’s Life (娘道 niáng dào). If Guo had agreed to purchase such ratings, his production company would have had to pay 72 million RMB ($10.5 million) for doctored ratings for the entire series. Continue reading →

“Rise of Phoenixes” on Netflix

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Source: Variety (8/29/18)
Netflix to Fly With China’s ‘Rise of Phoenixes’
By PATRICK FRATER

CREDIT: COURTESY OF NETFLIX

Global streaming giant Netflix has boarded Mandarin-language series “Rise of Phoenixes,” from China’s Croton Media. It will be available on the platform outside China from Sept. 14. “Phoenixes” is a 70-episode series loosely based on “Huang Quan,” a novel by Tianxia Guiyuan, and co-produced by Netflix along with Croton Media (China Syndication), K. Pictures, Hao Mai Culture, iQIYI, COL Group and New Film Association.

It marks the small-screen debut of actress Ni Ni and co-stars Chun Kun. Other notables include Shen Yan and Liu Haibo (“Chinese Style Relationship”) as directors, and William Chang Suk-ping (“The Grandmaster,” “In the Mood for Love,”) as artistic director and costume designer. Continue reading →

Story of Yanxi Palace

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Source: Inkstone News (8/15/18)
Half a billion views for these backstabbing concubines in a single day
By Sarah Dai

Hundreds of millions are following the Qing Dynasty scheming and intrigue on China's Netflix.

Hundreds of millions are following the Qing Dynasty scheming and intrigue on China’s Netflix. Photo: Huanyu Film

China’s Netflix has a record-breaking hit on its hands. A 70-episode period drama about a quick-witted maidservant and a group of back-stabbing imperial concubines has set a single-day online viewership record in China – of more than half a billion people.

A total of 530 million views – which works out 38% of the population if everyone watched one episode – tuned in on August 12 to follow the scheming and intrigue on Netflix-like iQiyi, China’s biggest streaming platform. Controlled by search engine giant Baidu, iQiyi went public on the Nasdaq exchange in March. Continue reading →

War on variety shows

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Source: SupChina (7/16/18)
China Is Escalating Its War On Variety Shows, Including Saturday Night Live
By Jiayun Feng

The Chinese version of Saturday Night Live (周六夜现场 zhōu liù yè xiànchǎng) and 真相吧!花花万物 (zhēnxiàng ba! huāhuā wànwù — roughly, “Tell me the truth! Spending money on everything”), two variety shows exclusively on the video streaming platform Youku, have recently been taken down for no apparent reason.

真相吧!花花万物, a talk show hosted by Taiwanese celebrities Kevin Tsai 蔡康永 and Dee Hsu 徐熙娣, was found unavailable on July 13. The Beijing News reports (in Chinese) that Chinese SNL disappeared the next day. A Youku spokesperson did not respond to the paper’s request for comment. Continue reading →

Stout, dark, and not pretty

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Source: NYT (6/30/18)
Opinion: The Rise and Fall of China’s ‘Stout,’ ‘Dark’ and ‘Not Pretty’ Pop Star
查看本文中文版 | 查看本文繁體中文版
By Yuan Ren

Wang Ju, a contestant on the popular online Chinese talent show “Produce 101,” performing in the show’s finale on June 23.CreditVisual China Group, via Getty Images

BEIJING — For a moment, it looked as if China’s rigid beauty standards were on the brink of being upended — or at least expanded slightly.

“Produce 101,” a popular online talent show, puts women through their paces for one of 11 spots in a female pop band; at first, Wang Ju, a 25-year-old model manager who’d almost lost her place on the show earlier in the season, seemed an unlikely candidate for success. But over the course of a few weeks in June, Ms. Wang rode a mounting wave of public affection to find herself, as of midmonth, ranked second among the show’s 22 finalists. Suddenly, Chinese commentators were at pains to explain just how Ms. Wang — a woman Chinese media variously referred to as “stout,” “dark” and “not pretty enough” — got there. Continue reading →

Tighter regulations on film and tv dramas

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Source: Sup China (6/12/18)
Internal Memo Reveals Tighter Regulations On Chinese Films And Television Dramas
By JIAYUN FENG

Censorship of Chinese films and TV programs has been bad recently, and it’s about to get worse. That’s the takeaway from an internal document circulating in the Chinese entertainment industry.

The memo (in Chinese), obtained and shared by WeChat blogger Xiaode Zhang 晓得张, is allegedly from the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (see this piece on recent developments at the organization known as SAPPRFT).

In the document, the government encourages content that showcases “people’s happiness” and features important upcoming events, such as the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the PRC in 2019, and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s 100th anniversary in 2021. Continue reading →

Marx Got It Right (1)

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Marx is indeed still relevant in China.  R. D. Laing offered an elegant summary of his most pertinent doctrine:

Marx used the concept of mystification to mean a plausible misrepresentation of what is going on (process) or what is being done (praxis) in the service of the interests of one socioeconomic class (the exploiters) over or against another class (the exploited).

By representing forms of exploitation as forms of benevolence, the exploiters bemuse the exploited into feeling at one with their exploiters, or into feeling gratitude for what (unrealized by them) is their exploitation, and, not least, into feeling bad or mad even to think of rebellion.

A. E. Clark <aec@raggedbanner.com>

Marx Got It Right

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Source: NYT (5/5/18)
On This Chinese TV Show, Participants Have Nothing to Lose but Their Chains
查看简体中文版 | 查看繁體中文版
By Chris Buckley

“Marx Got It Right,” a new TV show, is among the Communist Party’s attempts to reach a younger audience.CreditChina Central Television

BEIJING — Regal orchestral music strikes up, a computer-animated train races by and an old man with a bushy white beard looms onto the television screen. Then the studio audience applauds as an effervescent host opens an episode of China’s latest prime-time entertainment.

It looks like another Chinese talk show, but the bearded man is Karl Marx. This is “Marx Got It Right,” a slickly produced program that is part talk show, part indoctrination session — and a vivid illustration of the quirky efforts that the Communist Party under Xi Jinping is making to win over China’s millennials. Continue reading →