Competition is bringing a more Western taste for sex, violence
and melodrama to Chinese television
By PAUL MOONEY in Beijing
Tiandu isn’t exactly a model city. The vice mayor’s son
dabbles in smuggling and other gangster pursuits, and his father uses
his influence to protect him. His company employs murderous henchmen,
who use jars of human fingers to scare up cooperation. Official
blackmail is commonplace. A local customs officer recently discovered a
shipment of smuggled Mercedes. Before he could take action, he was
lured to a brothel, plied with alcohol and filmed in bed with a hooker.
Like most of Tiandu’s population, he became a co-conspirator in the
culture of corruption.
Tiandu is one of the sleaziest places that never existed. The setting
of China’s hit television series “Black Hole,” the fictional city is
loosely based on Fuyang City, Anhui province, site of an actual 1998
corruption case. It is a striking example of how far China has come
since the days when its state TV offered a steady diet of propaganda,
glorifying Communist party bosses as models of virtue. “This kind of
story would have been impossible a few years ago,” says Zhang Dandan,
vice president of Macau Five Star TV. “The government knows people are
smarter now, and that it can no longer lie to them.”
The edge is likely to get sharper. About 90 percent of China’s 400
million homes now have at least one TV set. At least one in four has
cable. Last year ad revenue reached an estimated $11.2 billion. With
China opening up, the government has allowed News Corp., Disney, Star
TV and AOL Time-Warner limited access. Rating companies like ACNielsen
are getting their people meters” into more homes, offering ratings
proof that entertainment formulas aren’t working. This February
state broadcaster CCTV put out its annual New Year’s variety marathon,
the usual five hours of patriotic songs and lame dance routines.
Newspaper reviewers slammed it. In one poll, 62 percent of viewers
called it “unsatisfactory.”
Once a state monopoly, CCTV can only lose ground with the same old
fare. CCTV has 10 channels that reach all over China. But as government
subsidies fall and ad revenues rise, the number of city and provincial
stations is increasing too fast to count. Estimates run from under
2,000 to more than 3,000. To lure viewers, more stations are buying or
imitating Western shows. Recent arrivals dubbed into Chinese include
“The X-Files,” about an FBI agent who uncovers a U.S. government
conspiracy to rule the Earth in collusion with invading aliens.
“Teletubbies” has been translated as “Antenna Babies.”
Imitations are more common. The latest rage is reality TV, but the
knockoffs have a Chinese twist. In the Chinese version of “Survivor,”
called “Approaching Shangri La,” players struggle to survive as a team,
rather than to knock each other out of the game. Still, there is
dramatic tension as players live for 30 days in the snowy wilds of
southwest China, with only meager rations and 10 matches. The winner is
the contestant who gets the most votes from the participants and the
viewing audience. One highlight: a sentimental middle-aged man hugging
a goat before his hungry teammates kill it. For the Chinese take on
“Temptation Island,” producer Chen Qiang rejected the American format,
which puts to the test of temptation on an island of beautiful singles.
He says Chinese viewers would find it “immoral.” Instead, his couples
stay together, competing with other couples in games on a tropical isle.
Talk shows need less softening for China. “On “Telling the Truth,” a
man who denounced his favorite primary-school teacher during the
Cultural Revolution recently reunited with her. As tears streaked his
face, he apologized before hundreds of millions of viewers. The
audience and the host were soon in tears as well. Somewhere, Oprah was
smiling.
Newer dramas feature Westerners in roles far more complex than the old
propaganda whipping boys. The cast of “Chinese Maids Working for
Foreign Families” stars a dozen foreigners in a funny soap opera about
the struggle of employer and employee to understand one another. With
China’s entry into the WTO, and its victorious bid for the 2008 Summer
Olympics, Chinese audiences are confident and eager to “engage the
world,” says Mark Rowswell, a Canadian actor who is one of the
best-known foreigners on Chinese TV.
There are still limits, of course. The censors recently yanked a
Taiwan-made soap opera called “Falling Star Garden” after TV stations
were deluged with parental complaints about a plot full of troubled,
materialistic teens. In early March, the outlawed Falun Gong spiritual
group had to hack its way into cable TV to broadcast an anti-government
harangue by group leader Li Hongzhi. Says one Beijing media analyst:
“To control people, the party needs two things—the gun and the media.”
That means that as China’s TV gets more commercial, it will get more
political only so far as the authorities allow. Anyone who goes too far
could find himself in a real black hole.
