Television

Dating show puts veto power in parents’ hands

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Source: Sinosphere, NYT (2/16/17)
Chinese Dating Show Puts Veto Power in Parents’ Hands
By KAROLINE KAN

The format of “Chinese Dating” adheres to Confucian traditions. The show’s hostess, Jin Xing, far left, is one of China’s most popular entertainment personalities. CreditChinese Dating

BEIJING — You are a young Chinese man whose father tells you the most important skill his future daughter-in-law must have is caring for her home and family. Your mother rejects a 40-year-old woman as your potential mate because she may be too old to bear children.

This is not prerevolutionary China, but a new TV dating show. Continue reading →

Overview of Spring Festival Gala

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Source: SUPChina (2/1/17)
The biggest TV show in the world
By The Editors
What China’s Spring Festival Gala says about a nation and its New Year traditions.

A screenshot of the opening fanfare for the 2017 Spring Festival Gala.

Over the years, China’s Spring Festival Gala, known as Chunwan (春晚 chūnwǎn), has evolved to become more than an officially sanctioned TV extravaganza to celebrate Chinese New Year. It’s also an accompaniment to the feast that most families enjoy together on New Year’s Eve. It’s hated as much as it’s loved, but it’s so popular that it can make the career of any musician, actor, comedian, or magician who performs in it. Produced annually by China Central Television (CCTV) since 1983, the show is a major topic of conversation around the dinner table and on social media during the weeklong Spring Festival holiday. The show this year reached 78.72 percent of China’s 1.35 billion people, or well in excess of 1 billion viewers (stats in Chinese here). Continue reading →

TV shows with subtitles?

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We are team teaching a course on film, television, and new media art in China at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago this semester. We are having a difficult time finding a few television shows with English subtitles. Can anyone recommend how to find subtitled versions of:

  • River Elegy
  • Yearnings
  • A Beijinger in New York
  • Foreign Babes in Beijing

With much appreciation,

Orianna Cacchione and Jennifer Lee
ocacchione@artic.edu
jlee241@saic.edu

Popular Media, Social Emotion and Public Discourse review

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MCLC and MCLC Resource Center are pleased to announce publication of Hui Faye Xiao’s review of Popular Media, Social Emotion and Public Discourse in Contemporary China (Routledge, 2014), by Shuyu Kong. The review appears below, but is best read online at:

https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/xiao/

My thanks to Jason McGrath, MCLC media studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk A. Denton, editor

Popular Media, Social Emotion and
Public Discourse in Contemporary China

By Shuyu Kong

Reviewed by Hui Faye Xiao
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright January, 2017)

Shuyu Kong, Popular Media, Social Emotion and Public Discourse in Contemporary China. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. 154 pp. ISBN: 978-0-415-71989-6 (Hardback: $140)

Shuyu Kong, Popular Media, Social Emotion and Public Discourse in Contemporary China. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. 154 pp. ISBN: 978-0-415-71989-6 (Hardback: $140)

Continuing the scholarly investigation of China’s radical socio-cultural transformation in her Consuming Literature: Best Sellers and the Commercialization of Literary Products in Contemporary China (2004), Shuyu Kong’s latest book, Popular Media, Social Emotion and Public Discourse in Contemporary China, examines the burgeoning cultural public sphere shaped by the widespread use of new media, “including the internet, mobile communications and other social media” (3). In the past few decades, a fast-growing body of scholarship has paid attention to the escalating coverage of new media in contemporary Chinese society and speculated upon its socio-political ramifications. Jürgen Habermas’s ideas of public sphere and civil society have been frequently cited by intellectuals and scholars concerned with China’s democratization. However, Kong’s use of public sphere stretches Habermas’s definition, which tends to emphasize the participatory politics of free-willed rational bourgeois individuals. Rather, this book revolves around a new conception of popular media as a public site of cultural production and participatory consumption as well as a transmitter of social emotions and affects. This innovative approach is much needed for a better understanding of today’s Chinese society, which is experiencing yet another change in the “structure of feeling” as a result of an ongoing post-revolutionary “cultural revolution.” Continue reading →

Red Star Over China (2)

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Some comments on Red Star Over China and Eva Chou’s query about the revival of interest in it:

  • Snow went to Shensi (home of Xi Zhongxun and Xi Jinping)
  • Snow was widely read in China back then (Ch. translations appeared before the US Version came out)
  • Snow also met Lu Xun
  • Snow did NOT meet “with Communist leaders including Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai in Xi’an” as this was KMT area.
  • Snow did meet General secretary Zhang Wentian and others in Bao’an.
  • The “80th anniv.” does not refer to the First army with Zhang, Zhou, Mao which arrived in ’35.

Yours,

Thomas Kampen <tk1893@yahoo.com>

Red Star Over China (1)

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In a high school 語文 textbook published by 人民教育出版社, in a volume with the theme of “Selections from Biographies, Chinese and Western,” the third excerpted biography (after those of Du Fu and Lu Xun) is Mao Zedong’s by Edgar Snow. I wondered a bit when I came across that. But it seems that things don’t happen in singletons. First a textbook joins the two men, now a tv series does. We know why Snow was widely read (in English) back then. What are the reasons now (in Chinese)?

Best regards,

Eva Shan Chou <choues@gmail.com>

Red Star Over China

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Source: Global Times (10/12/16)
Historical series ‘Red Star Over China’ to premiere on Hunan Satellite TV next week

The crew of Red Star Over China attend a ceremony kicking off production on January 17. Photo: IC

Historical series Red Star Over China, which follows the evolution of the Communist Party throughout the 1930s and 1940s through the eyes of US journalist Edgar Snow (1905-1972), is scheduled to debut on China’s Hunan Satellite Television next week. Continue reading →

TV show spotlights middle class anxieties

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Source: China Real Time, WSJ (8/25/16)
TV Show Spotlights Middle Class Anxieties in China
By Liyan Qi

Last year, more than 520,000 people left China to study abroad. A new Chinese TV show might give you some insight into why Chinese parents want to send their kids overseas. Photo: Linmon Pictures

A hit Chinese TV drama that tells the story of three families who sent their young teens to study abroad has surfaced middle-class doubts about their future in the country.

“A Love for Separation,” based on a novel by Lu Yingong, started screening last week and grabbed the public’s attention despite competing with the Olympic games for viewers. Users on the cultural website douban.com gave the show an average score of 8.2 out of 10. Continue reading →

Anti-corruption drive moves into tv dramas

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Source: China Film Insider (4/26/16)
China’s Anti-Corruption Drive Moves into Television Dramas
By Fergus Ryan

In the midst of a nationwide anti-corruption drive led by President Xi Jinping, China’s media regulators have lifted a long-standing ban on the production and primetime broadcast of television dramas featuring high-level corruption, clearing the way for harder-hitting content not seen since 2004.

In the Name of the People (人民的名义), a new television drama with a budget of over 120 million yuan ($18.5 million), is set to finish shooting in Nanjing in June and is expected to be broadcast the end of the year.

The 42-episode series is set to be the first major production with an anti-corruption theme since China’s media watchdog banished such programs from prime time 12 years ago. The show is expected to at least obliquely feature a top ranking government leader as a villain. Continue reading →

China’s Sex and the City without the sex

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Source: Sixth Tone (5/5/16)
New Drama is China’s ‘Sex and the City,’ Just Without the Sex
‘Ode to Joy,’ a new online TV show, has millions of fans, but also its fair share of critics.
By Wang Lianzhang

New Drama is China’s ‘Sex and the City,’ Just Without the Sex-000_1

Here’s something Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha could only ever have dreamed of: a daily audience of more than 500 million views.

But this is China, and “Ode to Joy,” a show being compared to “Sex and the City,” seems to have struck a chord. Ever since the first episode went online on April 18, the show has been a runaway success.

On iQIYI, just one of the five streaming websites the show is available on, the episodes had been watched more than 19 billion times as of Thursday morning. On microblogging platform Weibo, posts about the show have been read more than 30 billion times. Continue reading →

Reality show singer breaks taboo

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From: Judy Amory <jmamory@post.harvard.edu>
Source: The Guardian (4/1/16)
Reality show singer breaks China’s Cultural Revolution taboo
Yang Le draws applause and tears as song tells of how he lost his father in Mao’s crackdown on perceived enemies, which began 50 years ago
By Tom Phillips in Beijing

Yang Le feared the show’s producers might attempt to censor the lyrics.

Yang Le feared the show’s producers might attempt to censor the lyrics. Photograph: China Dragon TV

N early half a century after his father plunged to his death from the roof of a Beijing university, Yang Le stepped out on to the stage to tell millions of Chinese television viewers how Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution had torn his family apart.

“When I was young we were a family of six … My father was handsome, mum was young and beautiful,” sang the silver-haired contestant on China Star, the country’s answer to the X-Factor. “After the Cultural Revolution only five of us were left.”

When his lament-filled, taboo-breaking performance ended, Yang bit his lower lip. Applause rippled through the theatre; the judges leapt to their feet; tears streamed down cheeks.

Continue reading →

Liveblog summary of CCTV’s new year gala

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Liveblog summary of CCTV’s New Year’s Gala

For list members who didn’t have the time to follow the CCTV New Year’s Gala this year, a note that Manya Koetse live-blogged the entire six hour broadcast on ‘What’s On Weibo’:

http://www.whatsonweibo.com/cctvs-new-years-gala-2016/

猴年大吉！
Florian Schneider f.a.schneider@hum.leidenuniv.nl

Maya Lin finding her roots

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List members may be interested in watching the recent episode of PBS’s Finding Your Roots, which features Maya Lin. The episode includes a genealogy of Lin’s mother, Julia C. Lin (林明暉, nee 張明暉), who will be familiar to many MCLC list members.

While the episode mentions Maya Lin’s maternal grandfather, Dr. Foh-Sing Tsang 張福星, it doesn’t discuss him at any length. Julia several times told me that he was the personal physician to Madame Sun Yat-sen for many years.

Maya’s father (& Julia’s husband), Henry Lin, an accomplished ceramic artist, is mentioned in the show as well; among the interesting facts of his life not touched upon in the episode are that he was tutored by Shen Ts’ung-wen as a child, and his half sister was Lin Huiyin.

Discover how the ancestors of business mogul Richard Branson and architects Maya Lin and Frank Gehry took audacious risks to create opportunities, and how their luck, ingenuity and chutzpah was passed on to these three visionaries.

www.pbs.org/weta/finding-your-roots/visionaries-full-episode/14999/

Nicholas A. Kaldis <nkaldis@gmail.com>

Hate-watching the CCTV new year’s gala

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Source: China Real Time, WSJ (2/2/16)
Netizens Clamor for More Monkeys, Fewer Armored Tanks in CCTV Gala
By Eva Dou

Come for the New Year’s gala, stay for the military parade. Zuma Press

Hate-watching China Central Television’s annual spring festival gala, or chunwan, is a treasured pastime for many in China, what with the corny stand-up routines, stiff hairdos and outdated music (none of which prevents it from being China’s most-watched TV program each year with around 700 million viewers).

This year there is one more thing to grouse about: the military parade.

CCTV has announced that this year’s chunwan will include a reenactment of last September’s military parade marking the 70th anniversary of Japan’s defeat in World War II.

“We have a responsibility, a duty, to recreate the spectacular event of the great Sept. 3 military parade,” an organizer of this year’s gala said, as quoted in state media. Continue reading →