Chinese Television in the Twenty-First Century

Entertaining the Nation

Ruoyun Bai, Geng Song

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317755531
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The past two decades witnessed the rise of television entertainment in China. Although television networks are still state-owned and Party-controlled in China, the ideological landscape of television programs has become increasingly diverse and even paradoxical, simultaneously subservient and defiant, nationalistic and cosmopolitan, moralistic and fun-loving, extravagant and mundane. Studying Chinese television as a key node in the network of power relationships, therefore, provides us with a unique opportunity to understand the tension-fraught and, paradox-permeated conditions of Chinese post-socialism.

This book argues for a serious engagement with television entertainment. rethinking, It addresses the following questions. How is entertainment television politically and culturally significant in the Chinese context? How have political, industrial, and technological changes in the 2000s affected the way Chinese television relates to the state and society? How can we think of media regulation and censorship without perpetuating the myth of a self-serving authoritarian regime vs. a subdued cultural workforce? What do popular televisual texts tell us about the unsettled and reconfigured relations between commercial television and the state? The book presents a number of studies of popular television programs that are sensitive to the changing production and regulatory contexts for Chinese television in the twenty-first century.

As an interdisciplinary study of the television industry, this book covers a number of important issues in China today, such as censorship, nationalism, consumerism, social justice, and the central and local authorities. As such, it will appeal to a broad audience including students and scholars of Chinese culture and society, media studies, television studies, and cultural studies.

Part I

Entertaining TV – a new territory of significance

1 Teaching people how to live

Shenghuo programs on Chinese television

Wanning Sun

Economic reforms since the late 1970s have seen China dramatically transformed from a socialist to a largely capitalist economy, yet the everyday lives of Chinese people continues to be shaped by an ambiguous and paradoxical process that has witnessed the progressive applications of neoliberal strategies on the one hand and continuing and intensified (re)articulation of China’s socialist legacies on the other (Zhao 2008; Sun and Zhao 2009). In addition, although the state has shifted the burden of providing public housing, education, health, and essential services from itself to the market and individuals, Chinese media continues to operate according to the principle of both the “party line” and the “bottom line” (Zhao 1998). This tension and dynamics between the state and the market is inevitably played out on several levels. As privatization and the growing corporatization of a previously public sector has to a large extent turned the individual from a “workplace person” (danwei ren) and “institutionalized person” (zhidu ren) to a “social person” (shehui ren), it has also largely dissolved the mechanism of workplace socialization, ideological “thought work,” and ethical guidance one associates with socialist forms of moral education. In other words, parallel to the rollback of the Chinese state in the provision of public goods and services is the disappearance of a range of state-authorized figures and institutions that used to embody the moral legitimacy and leadership of the paternal Party-state, including party leaders at the work units, organized ideological study sessions as part of the work routine, or the mediation of familial, neighborly, and civic relationships from the ubiquitous, well-meaning “aunty” figures from the residential neighborhood committee on one’s street. While the Maoist state determined what proper life would be, leaving little room for individuals to make their own decisions (Farquhar and Zhang 2012), people are now actively pursuing a wide range of self-governing and self-enterprising activities that shape and optimize their life chances (Ong and Zhang 2008). We are now witnessing “China’s selective embrace of neoliberal logic as a strategic calculation for creating self-governing subjects who will enrich and strengthen Chinese authoritarian rule” (Ong and Zhang 2008: 10).

But China has never officially and openly pronounced itself to be a neoliberal state, and, indeed, some may find it odd that neoliberalism is used to describe a country such as China, where the government still holds a considerable portion of the country’s fixed assets and where strong institutions, rule of law, transparent markets, and democracy – the hallmark of neoliberal structure – are largely missing. Having said that, it is clear that many of China’s economic, social, and political strategies of governing are, indeed, neoliberal. And central to the Chinese neoliberal logic is the process of privatization in both the domain of material goods and services and the individual sense of the self (Zhang and Ong 2008). The myriad impact of this process has been explored from a number of angles (Rofel 2007; Zhang and Ong 2008; Anagnost 2004; Yan 2008; Hoffman 2010). It has also been observed that a number of differences between China and the liberal-democratic societies in the West remain firmly in place, making it crucial to “capture the situated constellations of socialist rule, neoliberal logic, and self-governing practices” (Ong and Zhang 2008: 5). More specifically, we are confronted with two central questions. Has China’s selective embrace of neoliberal socio-economic policies and practices led to some kind of neoliberal cultural politics? And if China is situated in the constellations of socialist rule, neoliberal logic, and self-governing practices, how do these constellations shape discursive processes?

A logical place to start addressing these questions is in the production, content, and consumption of television. Given that television is mostly free and accessible to the majority of the population in China, including remote and poor areas, it is not surprising that it is the most favored medium for engaging people in their self-governing and self-orienting initiatives. These popular media forums are also the birthplaces of various types of experts. In addition to conventional figures of doctors and scientists, psychologists, emotion counsellors, relationship consultants, and mental health therapists frequently appear on what has come to be referred to in media studies literature as the “lifestyle TV” programs, giving advice on a diverse range of topics regarding how to live a better life, including cooking, food and health, exercise and body care, fashion, house renovations, personal finance, ways of dealing with work-related stress, familial disputes, and parenting issues. One only has to cast a superficial glance at the local, provincial, and national television in China to realize that China has enthusiastically taken up the format of lifestyle television. Indeed, lifestyle television programs, intended to provide advice and information on sundry aspects of everyday life, make up the staple diet of everyday television viewing. Although the internet and self-help books are important sources of information, free-to-air television, due to its ubiquitousness and affordability, offers the most useful and viable source of knowledge for the majority of the population.

To account for the popularity of lifestyle television programs in China, many individuals, including those we interviewed, fell back on Chinese cultural tradition. After all, Chinese culture privileges the idea of self-cultivation and self-improvement. Although this may be true, it remains somewhat unclear how Chinese television translates the information and knowledge of the expert into the common sense of the ordinary people. Nor is it clear who is qualified to pass authoritative judgment and give credible advice and instructions in the lifestyle media. Yet knowing answers to these questions would shed important light on the social-political impact of television as a cultural form. After all, television is an integral part of a process by which the neoliberal technique of governing turns into the everyday technology of the self (Couldry 2010). If neoliberalism as a cultural project entails implementing economic policies “in and through culture and politics, reinforcing or contesting relations of class, race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity’ religion, or nationality” (Duggan 2003: xiv), then its impact will not be reduced or diminished unless the artificial separation between economics and culture comes undone. For this reason, the importance of exploring neoliberalism as constructed in and through cultural forms, discursive categories, and media practices cannot be overstated.

Like Couldry, I am also interested in exploring how reality TV, particularly advice shows and lifestyle programs, function as metaphors and metonyms of neoliberalism. However, more importantly, I propose to engage with the content of lifestyle shows on Chinese television to advance a particular approach of studying neoliberalism as a way of life under an authoritarian rule. The question to pursue here is how a particular way of life is taught, promoted, justified, and perpetuated through a particular set of cultural forms, discursive categories, and media practices. I describe this as a cultural-political approach to neoliberalism, in that, by taking this approach, I am primarily interested in who is invested with the power to diagnose individual problems and provide solutions, who is involved in shaping the dominant means of shaping the lingua franca, media and cultural forms, and dominant discursive practices that contribute to the formation of the neoliberal subject.

Here, I am concerned with the questions regarding whose conduct and ways of thinking are seen to be in need of change and formation, and how the popular categories of make-overs, self-transformations, and overhauls of the self, body, and soul in popular media and cultural expression provide justification and moral support to the transition from a state-regulated life to self-managed living. The intention of such an approach is both methodological and analytic. Approaching Chinese lifestyle television programs with these questions in mind, I hope to generate not only clues to the cultural politics of power in contemporary China, but also to new pathways of understanding the limitations, as well as the resourcefulness, of neoliberalism at large. My point of departure is this: in the same way that the notion of neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics (Harvey 2005) may evoke a somewhat normative idea of what neoliberalism is, determining the presence – or absence – of neoliberal elements in China against the benchmark of the West is even more problematic. After all, no society embodies a standard textbook definition of neoliberalism, nor does discursive neoliberalism take identical shape and form everywhere. Neoliberalism is known to have found fertile ground in a number of social contexts – both the Western world and Asia, liberal democratic and one-party nation-states (Ong 2006). Furthermore, neoliberalism is understood to operate at different levels as the creation of meaning, including neoliberalism as market principles (often described as “neoliberalism proper”), a set of languages, metaphors and techniques that are used to implement neoliberalism proper (the “neoliberal doctrine”), and, finally, a “whole way of life” for which neoliberalism provides the organizing metaphors or “a culture of neoliberalism” (Couldry 2010: 5). Building on these delineations, we now know that neoliberalism produces a “hegemonic rationality,” which works to promote a particular way of narrating one’s life, while blocking other narratives from view (Couldry 2010: 6).

Lifestyle television, as I demonstrate in this chapter, plays an important role in the wide range of self-managerial, self-governing activities engaged in by ordinary Chinese. In what follows, after a brief section that maps out the range of lifestyle advice programs on Chinese TV, I will turn to local television to examine how health-related lifestyle programs – the most dominant and pervasive theme/topic in China’s lifestyle programs – teaches self-care. This is followed by an analysis of lifestyle programs focusing on emotional and relationship matters, with regards to how psychologists and counsellors on national television help shape and reinvent the private self. Finally, I explore the construction of a much less elitist form of expertise through the lifestyle programs of Shanghai TV (SMG), which, I suggest, represents yet another type of claim for recognition. This multi-sited approach aims to capture the breadth, diversity, and texture of lifestyle television programs in China, in terms of the scale of production (local, metropolitan, and national), content and genres (programs dealing with matters of the body, mind, and the heart), and in terms of class- and place-specific pedagogic and aesthetic style.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that what is often referred to as “lifestyle television” in the Anglophone world is, in fact, described simply as life (shenghuo), rather than lifestyle (Lewis et al. 2012). Shenghuo is a widely used label describing a wide range of topics, such as cooking, shopping, home decoration, renovation, body care, travel, and healthy living, all of which aim to teach viewers how to live their lives. The most popular topics on Chinese television are health and well-being, psychological and emotional well-being, and interpersonal and familial relationships. These shows can be found on national, provincial, metropolitan, as well as local television. On CCTV, shenghuo programs are dispersed, with no singular designated channel, yet many channels carry shenghuo themes or topics. Then, each provincial television station (there are more than thirty in China) produces, on average, half a dozen channels, one of which usually is dedicated to shenghuo content. These programs, together with satellite transmitted programs produced by half a dozen metropolitan television stations, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Shenzhen, and Chongqing, are directly available to the national audience. Further down the geographic scale is the city- and county-level television, which produces the largest amount of lifestyle programs and which enjoy a steady and loyal local viewership, due to a strong local relevance. Terrestrially transmitted and available only to local viewers, they nevertheless have a distinct narrative structure and format and address a specific set of local concerns.

The political-economic role of shenghuo content cannot be truly appreciated without placing it next to two other essential domains of Chinese television: a politically necessary but commercially unviable news sector and a highly popular but potentially controversial entertainment sector. Although shenghuo television often takes the shape of entertainment as well as news and current affairs, and although a large segment of shenghuo programs cannot compete with dating shows and pop idol shows in terms of ratings, they are nevertheless lucrative and certainly much less controversial from the point of view of content regulation. These shenghuo-themed programs on both CCTV and provincial stations are hybrid in format, combine all the functions of television – news transmission, entertainment, education, and service – yet they do not fit neatly into the category of either news or entertainment. Furthermore, though not the highest rating shows, they generate considerable revenue through product placement, infomercials, embedded advertising, and product sponsorship, as well as advertising.

Most importantly, these programs are the unsung heroes in the ideological ecology of Chinese television, and their role in the process of “individuation” – taking responsibility, taking life into one’s own hands, and facing the consequence of one’s own action (Ong and Zhang 2008) – is profound and far-reaching. Ye...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Entertaining TV – a new territory of significance
• Part II “Curbing entertainment”
• Part III Commercial television and the reconfiguration of history, memory, and nationalism
• Index