Two Billion Eyes

The Story of China Central Television

Ying Zhu

• Publisher: The New Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781595588029
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Media & Communications Industry
• Index: Business

"The definitive work on Chinese television... A pioneering picture of CCTV and its crucial role in the contemporary Chinese political economy" (Robert W.McChesney, author of Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy ). As China navigates the murky waters of a "third way" with liberal economic policies under a strict political regime, the surprising battleground for China's future emerges in the country's highest rated television network—China Central Television, or CCTV. With 16 internationally broadcast channels and over 1.2 billion viewers, CCTV is a powerhouse in conveying Chinese news and entertainment. The hybrid nature of the network has also transformed it into an unexpected site of discourse in a country that has little official space for negotiation. While CCTV programming is state sponsored—and censored—the popularity and profit of the station are determined by the people. And as the Chinese Communist Party seeks to exert its own voice on domestic and international affairs, the prospect of finding an amenable audience becomes increasingly paramount. Through a series of interviews with a fascinating cast of power players including a director of a special topic program that incited the 1989 student movement, current and past presidents of CCTV, and producers at the frontline of the network's rapidly evolving role in Chinese culture, celebrated media analyst Ying Zhu unlocks a doorway to political power that has long been shrouded in mystery. "An indispensable guide to the Chinese media landscape." — The New Inquiry "Up until Two Billion Eyes, the view of Chinese media has often been limited... Ying Zhu expands the periphery of our vision." — Los Angeles Review of Books

1

TELEVISION AS CULTURAL CONTROL IN CHINA

As the story goes, on July 16, 1985, a morning phone call summoned Yang Weiguang, vice president of the Central People’s Broadcasting Station, to the office of the deputy head of the Ministry of Radio, Film, and Television (MRFT, the precursor to SARFT), Hao Pingnan.¹ Hao informed Yang that he would be reassigned as vice president and deputy editor in chief of China Central Television. Yang was incredulous. Leaving twenty-four years of service at the national radio station for uncharted territory at the age of forty-nine would be no small challenge. The next morning, he anxiously pulled the MRFT chief aside, pleading to stay on at the radio station. His wish was not granted—Yang was dispatched to CCTV to lead its News Division. Just six years later, in December 1991, he was appointed president and tasked with overseeing the first decade of CCTV’s transformation from state-funded proselytizer to commercial broadcaster.

Despite arriving at CCTV trailing a professional provenance of decidedly doctrinaire training and experience, Yang would eventually prove to be an innovator. A graduate in 1961 of the first journalism department in China at Renmin (People’s) University,² Yang immediately took a position at the national radio station. Among twenty-eight graduates that year, he was one of seven who were allowed to stay in Beijing. In those early years leading up to the Cultural Revolution, his peasant family background no doubt helped him secure a steady position at Central People’s Broadcasting Station, where he worked until his reassignment to the national television station. From central training, to central radio, and on to central television, he imbibed and embodied journalism according to Mao, making him a safe choice to lead CCTV when the party embarked on its radical media reform.

Yang Weiguang left his CCTV post in February 1999, three years past the typical retirement age of sixty. Today, many seasoned CCTV employees still consider the ten years of Yang’s management CCTV’s best days. When I talked to people in the spring of 2008, fond memories about Yang abounded. He oversaw a period of unsurpassed productivity and innovation, and numerous programs, such as the enterprising current affairs programs Focus and Oriental Horizon and the newsmagazine News Probe, were introduced in an effort to break CCTV’s staid image. Documentary filmmaker Xia Jun, a CCTV producer under Yang, reminisced about how Yang skillfully navigated the competing interests at the station: “Yang was one of a kind, someone who cares only about building a top-rate media enterprise. Yang was motivated by his desire to advance CCTV. This, together with his superb individual quality, wisdom, dynamism, and his ability to motivate other people for the good of CCTV, was what made his time the golden era of CCTV.” Yang’s decade at CCTV was unquestionably the network’s high point in terms of party approval, market position, and public stature. And though he was no longer the president of CCTV, Yang remained a formidable force in the industry and continued to be consulted on policy issues. At the time of our interview in the summer of 2008, he still held the title of honorary chairman of the Chinese TV Artist Association, a trade union formed in May 1985.

But if he’d had his way in 1985, none of this would have come to pass. Indeed, Yang loved his radio days, so much so that he was reluctant to leave: “I had worked in radio for a long time, working my way up from a journalist to editor, division chief, director, and then president. Radio was my world. Television was relatively new at the time and did not have the same cachet as radio. All the talents were in radio.”

Interviewing Yang triggered my own reflections on the changes taking place in Chinese society and brought up my own memories of growing up listening to radio back in a time when television was still mostly just fantasy.

Radio had diligently served the CCP and the party-state since its origins during the revolution in Yan’an Province in the early 1940s. During Mao’s era, radio connected China’s rural masses to the state through a pervasive system of wired loudspeakers installed in schools, on army bases, and in other public spaces. These were part of the fabric of my generation’s childhood. Growing up in a large apartment complex that belonged to my parents’ work unit, I woke up every morning at 6 A.M. to the news and revolutionary songs on China National Radio blasted over loudspeakers mounted under a roof corner of each apartment building. In addition to delivering party directives and revolutionary songs and music, radio programs via loudspeakers set the daily rhythm for us. The company’s loudspeakers further inserted announcements about open-air movies, special performances, and holiday schedules, and information about last-minute meetings, which meant that parents would be frequently away from home to study new party directives, leaving us latchkey kids to entertain ourselves. Not much room for “tiger moms.”

The mission of radio during Mao’s era was simple and effective: propagate the party line and its ideology of mass mobilization, class struggle, thought reform, and continuous revolution—essentially, promote every aspect of the greatest social engineering show on earth, designed literally to change people’s minds about how to live and co-exist. No doubt, the ubiquity of radio transmission aided considerably in the conversion of the masses to their patriotic role.

From the late 1950s, as China launched its Great Leap Forward, a range of other media, from newspapers to posters to live theater and film, thrived, as did television, which debuted in 1958 when Beijing Television was founded. From 1958 to the late 1970s, Beijing TV served the party by advocating continuous political movements from the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1958 to the Great Leap Forward campaign of 1959, and finally to the 1966–76 Cultural Revolution. Beijing TV was renamed China Central Television in 1978, the year China ushered in an era of economic reform.

Even with an established national television station, up until well into the 1970s, TV was still not a popular medium. China lagged behind in the adoption of television sets because of the enormous poverty among its mostly rural population, which was exacerbated by the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward (1958–61) and the chaos inflicted on cultural production during the Cultural Revolution. Television development only really took off in the 1980s following a series of decisions to boost the production of television sets and expand the number of channels and broadcast hours. It wouldn’t be until the early 1990s when television finally eclipsed radio as the most important mass medium in China.³ When it did, the party’s leaders had a number of ways to utilize this new tool. Yang’s move from radio to television was a natural progression despite his initial misgivings: it echoed the impetus for reform, modernization, and nation building of the new China under Deng Xiaoping. This was probably what the ministry had in mind when he was reassigned—Yang would be the person to carry the central mouthpiece function from one medium to the next.

The Development of an Interventionist Cultural-Media Policy

Every government has its own ideas about the role of media in society and how best to regulate it in order to achieve a proper balance of economic, social, and cultural forces. In the West, cultural policy ostensibly aims to promote the broadest possible “marketplace of ideas” and facilitate the national ideal of an informed and intelligent public as the foundation of democratic government. This basic ideal has been a constant in American cultural policy. While such democratic rationales for cultural policy underwite Western liberalism, actual cultural production is not free of policy or, for that matter, government intervention.

Cultural policy in the People’s Republic has been interventionist for several decades—the constant being the subservience of art to politics. However, the goals and methods of cultural (and media) policy have changed in tandem with distinct periods in China’s political development. PRC cultural policy is founded on principles formulated by Mao in his “Talks on Literature and Art,” delivered in the caves of Yan’an (headquarters of the revolution) in 1942, which called for a “didactic, propagandistic art for the masses.”⁴ Richard Kraus notes that “the new state created a set of institutions that hired more artists in more organizations, but produced less art with less variety.”⁵ And as George Semsel suggests, this notion is rooted in a longer tradition: “Chinese aesthetics places emphasis on the unity of beauty and kindness—relating the appreciation of the beautiful with moral and ethical conduct. For centuries the ideas that ‘literature expresses ideology’ and ‘art contains morality and ethics’ dominated the ancient theories of literature and art. The establishment of film as a tool for political education probably resulted from the culture that formed when changes in Chinese society took the political standard as its essence.”⁶

This is not to establish a hoary philosophical ideal—Chinese aesthetics—as an inalterable stamp on the soul of the nation, but rather to acknowledge a greater relative emphasis, compared to Western traditions of art as critical vanguard, on the responsibility of art in the normalization of society: in other words, art teaches moral lessons rather than testing boundaries. The subservience of the media to politics remains part of China’s official ideology, wherein regulating art and entertainment to conform to and strengthen the moral and ethical fabric is the norm.

Today, cultural policy in the post-Mao reform era might have moved away from overtly didactic propaganda, but the notion that literature and art must serve the people endures as a first principle, reinforced by successive Chinese leaders, from Deng Xiaoping to Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and, very likely, the upcoming new leader Xi Jinping. In January 2012, a new round of crackdowns on racy entertainment programs on prime-time Chinese television prompted Western media analysts to speculate about China’s tightening cultural control. The cycle of tightening and loosening is nothing new in China; as the Chinese put it, “For every measure from the top, there are strategies to side-step it.”

In Marketing Dictatorship, Anne-Marie Brady describes the evolution of Chinese propaganda theory in the 1980s and early 1990s, which proceeded through fits and starts until it was settled, along with broader questions about China’s developmental course following Deng Xiaoping’s “southern tour.”⁷ With the party leadership still unsettled in the wake of 1989’s Tiananmen protests and with some conservatives visibly doubting the reform agenda, Deng went on the road in the spring of 1992 to sell his market reform agenda, which was at the time under attack by archconservatives. Traveling from the southern province of Guangdong to Shanghai, he made a series of speeches reasserting the necessity of the “open door” policy and economic liberalism. Then president Jiang Zemin eventually fell in behind Deng’s vision, and the reform era rolled forward, including transformations to the party’s approach to media and communications, which moved from a Leninist model that functioned as a “tool of mass propaganda and agitation” to a more “public relations” style that was suited to “ruling by popular consent.”⁸

In 2000 Jiang embarked on a southern tour of his own, during which he added his own enumerated theory to the party platform, the Three Represents. The Three Represents are less significant for their particular content, which is hazy party-speak, and more for their titular emphasis on representation, which suggests a government awareness of the changing basis of its legitimacy, thus indicating a shift toward a model of gradually increasing dependence on popular approval.

The Party’s greatest political strength is that we have maintained close ties with the masses, and the greatest danger since assuming political power has lain in the possibility of being estranged from them. Whether the line, principles and policies the Party formulates conform to the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the people must be taken as the highest criterion for judging them, and whether the people are satisfied with and agree with them must be taken as their basis and goal. Our cadres must maintain the work style and the way of thinking of “from the masses, to the masses.” They must be concerned about the people’s hardships, listen to their opinions and protect their interests.⁹

The Three Represents were eventually replaced by the Harmonious Society, introduced by the new administration, led by Hu Jintao, during the 2005 National People’s Congress. Hu’s new guiding model was a concerted effort to shift China’s focus from economic growth to a more traditional emphasis on societal balance and harmony across all fronts, including art, literature, culture, media, and education.¹⁰ After Hu and other party leaders, including the former propaganda czar Li Changchun, met with 450 media chiefs at the Great Hall of the People in October 2006 to reinforce the “harmonious society message,”¹¹ Chinese television responded by embedding its programs with themes promoting sage leadership, a more egalitarian distribution of income, community harmony, and state benevolence.

The domestically targeted “Harmonious Society” slogan has in recent years been coupled with “going out” (zou chuqu) and the promotion of China’s soft power globally. The attention now accorded to soft power is intended to repair the country’s tarnished international image, which remains, for the most part, negative.¹² To raise China’s global profile and improve its image abroad, a new Office of Public Diplomacy has been established under the Foreign Ministry. Meanwhile the State Council Information Office coordinated with China’s media organizations to “go out” and establish a global foothold. Reportedly the Chinese government invested US$8.7 billion in 2009–10¹³ in China’s four major state-run media organizations: China Central Television, China Radio International, Xinhua News Agency, and the China Daily newspaper. The investment was intended to give the major party organs a design makeover and expansion of capabilities to lessen the appearance of propaganda—so long as one didn’t know where the four were getting their money. Xinhua TV now operates a twenty-four-hour News Channel imitative of Al Jazeera, and CCTV News is poised to compete with CNN and the BBC, broadcasting in five languages with a global audience of about 125 million.¹⁴

Transparency and the Right to Know: The Earthquake Coverage

In the initial days following the Sichuan earthquake, the government’s investment in “going out” seemed to be paying off. After recovering from its initial shock, the party seized the opportunity opened up by the global outpouring of sympathy and the extraordinary performance of Chinese media professionals to actively work on reconstructing its image, which was tarnished at the time by the negative international media coverage regarding its treatment of Tibetan protesters in the run-up to the Olympics. The Hu Jintao administration made a practical and diplomatic decision to accept foreign assistance, and, in pointed contrast to the foreign media exclusion from Tibet, allowed reporting in Sichuan ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Television as Cultural Control in China
• 2. A View from the Top: Managing the Commercial Revolution at CCTV
• 3. Making the News
• 4. Delivering the News: Profiles of Three News Anchors
• 5. Rise of the Powerful Nations and the Finance and Economics Channel
• 6. Xia Jun and Chen Xiaoqing: Documentarians and Critics Alike
• 7. The Cultivated and the Vulgar: Game Shows and Lectures
• 8. “Going Out” Via CCTV-International
• 9. Challenging CCTV’s Domestic Dominance: Hunan Satellite Television and Phoenix TV
• 10. Half the Sky and Women’s Programming
• 11. The New Nationalism: Covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics
• Conclusion: China Central Television and the Chinese Model
• Notes
• Index
• Celebrating 20 Years of Independent Publishing