One of the clearest memories of my youth as a young Red Guard in China, during the late 1960s, is of fighting alongside my comrades for control of the local loudspeaker network. The speakers, which day and night blared out revolutionary songs, recitations of Mao's writings or readings from the People's Daily, were the main means of communication, driving forward Mao's campaign to overthrow entrenched bureaucracy. I can no longer recall the ideological differences dividing the Red Guard group to which I belonged from the opposing group. But the differences resulted in real violence, including night-time raids on the residential block which acted as the opposition's loudspeaker network centre. We captured this at least once, overcoming iron pipe-wielding youths who guarded the sand-bagged top storey control room. As the only foreigner-albeit only 10 years old-I was granted the privilege of a personal address. I dread to think what turgid slogans tripped off my young tongue. But this was the Cultural Revolution and we were obeying Mao's call for youth to attack political and academic authority-"to bombard the headquarters."
Thirty years later, the Cultural Revolution generation is now running China's mass media. But the system is no longer based on the 100m loudspeakers which had been strung up in most colleges, schools, housing blocks, factories and villages. Today, nearly 90 per cent of China's 350m homes have televisions and about 70m urban homes have multi-channel cable television (compared with 60m in the US). The message of the new media is also different. Collectivism and egalitarianism have given way to tacit encouragement of individualism and consumerism: the Chinese are being encouraged-in a carefully controlled manner-to speak their minds.
Oprah winfrey, Chinese-style
Beijing, September 1998. It's Saturday night and the main state television network, China Central Television (CCTV), is broadcasting its variety spectacular-modern pop songs and disco dancers. The scene changes, and briefly we are back in the Cultural Revolution era. But now it is pure nostalgia, a bit of retro television. Clad in his white army uniform, a now-portly opera singer, who once roused the masses, sings the praises of Mao, socialism and the CCP. A giant, fluttering red, five-star national flag takes up most of the video wall behind a troupe of gaily-dressed national minority dancers. Thanking him politely, the television hostess moves smoothly back to the present: a comic sketch about modern family life involving a professional wife and her equally busy husband.
It is Sunday morning, 7am-time for CCTV's morning news. Almost all the coverage is devoted to the comings and goings of party leaders: party conferences (polite applause); meeting foreign dignitaries (smiles and handshakes); speeches to the troops battling against the terrible floods (morale-boosting but stiffly delivered). The anchor is serious but aloof. It is the official bulletin and, as in Soviet Russia, the ability to decode the minutiae of these reports is a condition of understanding official politics. CCTV's evening news bulletin is one of the country's most watched television programmes, often achieving audiences in the hundreds of millions. Apart from being one of the Party's most important means of disseminating its worldview, the news slot is also a money spinner. Rates for the shampoo, wine, television and portable phone adverts are some of the most expensive on Chinese television.
On Sunday morning, after the news, comes what many viewers have waited for: the remarkable Speak the Truth, China's version of the Oprah Winfrey and Jerry Springer shows. For 40 minutes on CCTV1 the show captivates a growing number of viewers; despite its early morning schedule, it is CCTV's highest-rated daytime show, with 40m viewers.
Speak the Truth is the creation of Shi Jian, a 30-something producer and rising star within CCTV's news and current affairs department. Clutching his mobile phone, beeper and Marlboros, Shi Jian looks like a typical television producer. After graduating from the prestigious Beijing Broadcasting Institute he spent 13 years as a current affairs producer. For the past two years he has struggled to make this hybrid format work-taking the broad idea of the show from videos of American chat shows and adapting it to Chinese circumstances.
Most of China had seen nothing like this before. Despite the supposed power of western satellite broadcasting to overturn authoritarian regimes, in China no more than a few hundred thousand can receive satellite television directly. Indeed, most of rural China, where over 75 per cent of the population live, can still only get one or at most two of their own national network's eight channels (of which five are transmitted via satellite). Nevertheless, since the early 1990s there has been an explosion in channels and stations: as well as CCTV's eight channels, there are some 700 free-to-air provincial or city stations (all terrestrial). Big city stations, such as Beijing and Shanghai, compete with provincial stations and the national network, CCTV. In addition, there are 4,000 cable networks-from those with a few hundred subscribers to the 10m network in Shanghai. (All these stations, including the national network and cable television, are publicly owned, whether by central or local government.)
Alongside this rapid change in the infrastructure of television is an extraordinary cultural upheaval in programming. A recent Speak the Truth, for example, featured a father and his teenage daughter frankly debating the growing gap between them. The man, accompanied by his wife, was Professor Wang Dong Cheng-articulate and honest. He dislikes modern pop music; he is upset that his daughter prefers pop music and playing with her cat to serious homework. True, he doesn't often show his love for her, but how else can you make her heart tougher? "Only by being tough can you survive in today's society," he says. Then, Jerry Springer-style, the suave and witty host brings on daughter Lin Lin. "My father shows more affection to other people's children and he's always criticising me." Ten minutes later the show reaches its climax as the mother tells how Lin Lin really does love her father-going to his bedside to stroke his greying hair as he sleeps. And turning to her daughter, she quietly tells her: "Your father really loves you, but he just expresses it differently." Cut to close up of Lin Lin's bowed head, tears falling. Cut to women in audience wiping their eyes. Cut to shot of the host also holding back the tears. The father vows to support his daughter. "She is smart enough to do anything she wants," he says. Lin Lin looks happy-a sort of reconciliation? Roll credits.
In an interview for Prospect, Shi Jian talks proudly of other shows which explored the more contentious areas of environmentalism and animal welfare. He recently had a studio full of old men with their beloved caged birds next to animal liberationists, some of whom had been to the old men's neighbourhood to release the birds. The show represented a conflict between traditional values-keeping birds is an ancient pastime-and the modern conscience. "Some in the studio audience were grasping at the microphone to make their points. It was all so exciting," Shi recalls. As a d?nouement, one old man changed sides after an animal liberationist asked if he would prefer being caged to freedom. Another positive message. Roll credits.
For all the radical reforms within CCTV over the past decade, programme content is still overseen by the propaganda department of the Communist Party central committee, whose power is impressed upon all who enter CCTV's main complex. Armed People's Liberation Army troopers with white ceremonial gloves guard its main gates as well as the doors to all the news studios-the reform of programming on CCTV is no subversive phenomenon; the programmes have the imprimatur of the highest authority. Speak the Truth's mix of popular topics and emotional debate has brought increased ratings and support from the political leadership. Now it has been promised a prime time slot and Shi Jian has recently been promoted again.
Coca-Cola television
The explosion in channels and stations means that in some urban areas viewers can now get up to 32 channels on cable. You can zap from game shows (one station is airing a British format called Go Bingo) to investigative series, from consumer programmes to lifestyle channels, from soap operas (last year China produced more than 7,000 episodes) to shopping channels. Beijing cable television has a 12-hour-a-day shopping channel and in 1996 CCTV itself experimented with the idea of teaming up with a Californian shopping channel company. This excited much interest in the US; Colin Powell even declared: "There is no way communism can compete with a salad shooter for $9.95." But it appears that "communism" is getting good at selling salad shooters itself.
Increasingly, advertising is the main source of funds for China's biggest stations. CCTV took $495m of the $1.38 billion spent on television advertising in China last year. From being a receiver of state subsidy, it became a net contributor in 1997, handing over $132m.
In 1998, commercialisation of the media was given a further boost by Prime Minister Zhu Rong Ji's efforts to make all state enterprises more responsive to the market. CCTV is now planning to become a broadcaster/publisher along Channel 4 lines. All programmes, apart from news, are to be sub-contracted to independents. The old iron rice bowl has given way to the flexible world of take-away contracts.
Sun Xuan Bei, a 46-year-old Beijing radio presenter and former Red Guard, welcomes these changes. During the Cultural Revolution she spent five years as a propagandist in a song-and-dance troupe in Inner Mongolia. Today she is one of the capital's most popular radio chat show hosts on Beijing Economic Radio-so-called because of its more commercial ethos. But independence has its price. "If you're not good enough you can get fired," says Sun. On the other hand, with pay and bonuses now directly linked to programming success and advertising income, some staff clearly benefit from the new economics. And Beijing Economic Radio is clearly doing well with the ever-reliable ratings formula of sex, shopping and celebrities. The Ordinary Persons Odds & Ends Exchange (a radio version of Exchange & Mart) tops the list. Then comes the matchmaking show, Red Girl, where single men and women chat each other up, live on air.
Cable television is the least regulated and most commercial of China's television sectors. The 4,000 cable networks are encouraged to be populist and profitable and are supervised only lightly. Their sheer numbers make them difficult to control and fewer than 1,200 are officially approved. In 1995, a Ministry of Radio and Television crackdown led to closure or fining of eight stations for broadcasting obscene or smuggled material. But with 70m homes cabled up, cable television has become a driving force behind the tabloidisation of Chinese television. Its programming is described by insiders as "Coca-Cola" programming, in contrast to CCTV's "distilled water."
But economic pressure is apparently driving CCTV towards its own Coca-Cola television. In January, it began to roll out its own pay television service-initially in 10,000 villages, but later in the richer urban areas. The network has been courted by US, Australian and South African television companies as well as by the ever-present News Corporation. The South African conglomerate MIH has won the contract to supply tens of thousands of decoders, but Encore International, a subsidiary of the US cable television giant TCI, is hoping to supply whole channels of US programming. While News Corporation has relied on reaching Chinese viewers by the semi-official method of re-transmission of its satellite broadcasts through some of the local cable networks (its part-owned Phoenix channel claims 45m viewers), TCI is marching in the front door at the highest state levels, hoping to sell blocks of its programmes to CCTV.
John Sie, the Chinese-American boss of Encore International, has developed the policy of "reciprocity" in dealings with China and India. In exchange for giving Chinese television access to the US, Sie gets direct access to China's masses for Hollywood. "If you deal with the central government fairly, they will defend you. Understanding, respect and reciprocity is what it takes," he says. But as an overseas Chinese, Sie knows perfectly well that not all that comes out of Hollywood is going to be suitable for China.
Cultural resistance
China will try to resist what it finds undesirable in the western media. The kind of flies coming through China's open window concerns not only the political leadership (the conservatives have mounted campaigns against it), but also media professionals such as Professor Zhou Xiao Pu from the People's University in Beijing. Zhou, who advises the producers of Speak the Truth, fears that "junk journalism"-movie stars and trivia with "no social value"-could take firmer hold in China.
Shi Jian of Speak the Truth is also beginning to worry. His trip to the US this year certainly gave him pause. American television, he says, has no sense of social responsibility, with its "invasions of privacy, gross sexual innuendo and jokes about politics." This is not just a conservative response; it offends a deeper sense of national identity.
Like Zhou Xiao Pu, Shi Jian was brought up with the view that culture and media exist to educate. He wants to help find solutions to China's complex social problems. "We must consider the message of the programmes we make," he says. "We always have the educational role of the media on our minds."
But on evidence available at roadside magazine and newspaper stalls a few paces from the main gate of the People's University, many popular journals do not share these concerns. The cover of the July issue of Fashion Today-a popular semi-legal journal-sought to entice readers with a scantily-clad model on its front cover and the headline: "Three corrupt officials and one model: the horrifying inside story." The blurb tells of Beijing's former mayor, his son and the deputy mayor, who "openly take the same woman as a lover. While the mayor gave her a $125,000 car and the deputy mayor a four-room apartment, the son gave her sexual excitement." The tabloid did not deliver the real details of this scandal, which had already been widely reported following the trial of mayor Chen Xi Tong. The seven-page story is a factionalised version-real names and addresses altered. Readers can also buy (at an expensive $1) legal but equally sensationalist magazines such as Indonesia Turmoil, with its gruesome pictures of the dismembered bodies of Chinese men and women. The magazine promises to report on the "killing, burning, raping and abusing of Chinese women" during Indonesia's violent summer. At the more respectable end of the tabloid magazine market is Modern Information, with a flattering story about the wives of the country's leaders and "The murder by spies of Princess Diana: the horrifying inside story as broadcast by British television." China is also developing a tabloid newspaper market: the Beijing Youth Daily and the Guangzhou-based Southern Weekend both carry brash, bold, picture-led investigative stories.
The popularity of these publications belies the professor's hope that sensationalism is a "mistake the western media makes." But China is also benefiting from this more open media market. There is, for example, a growing market in popular books. The heavy political tomes of Mao or Deng are being replaced by books on economics, the Cultural Revolution, even one on class distinctions by the novelist Liang Xiao Sheng. There appears to be a large appetite for accessible analysis, recent social history and, most of all, discussion of the personal. Some of the most popular books are journalistic versions of Speak the Truth. Ordinary people unburdening themselves in print about sex, love, divorce, extra-marital relations, have been turned into a book by An Dun, a 29-year-old reporter from the Beijing Youth Daily. Her book, Absolute Privacy, is a runaway best-seller.
One of her stories was about a 30-year-old married university lecturer who fell in love with one of her students. It created a big stir in a country where, only a decade ago, extra-marital relationships were taboo. A mother of one, she divorced her husband and went into voluntary single parenthood, only for the relationship to fall apart. "I've been kept in her love shackles for too long," her lover told An Dun.
China Daily's culture critic Ji Tao suggests that the new reportage also breaks ground for its journalistic neutrality: "The authors do not suggest what is right or wrong." Neither traditional Chinese morality nor the modern "Ku" (urban lingo for "cool") view of sex is promoted in these volumes.
Training people to speak out
In the past, thinking was correct or it was reactionary. Thinking was something to be struggled over, moulded and remoulded. It was not private. Individualism was not encouraged and peer pressure to conform was overwhelming.
I still remember how, during the early Cultural Revolution, my own behaviour and that of my fellow pupils changed almost overnight from respectful pupils obediently sitting at our desks, to Red Guards holding "struggle meetings" where teachers were humiliated in front of us and ordered to bow and wear dunce's caps. I even wrote a wall poster attacking my favourite teacher for not giving enough help to a backward pupil-a result of her bourgeois arrogance. Only the sight at the foot of a staircase of the body of another teacher, who had jumped to her death, brought home to me the awful consequences of this mass conformism. But conformism is not a recent phenomenon in China. According to one traditional saying: people who become prominent die first.
Overcoming the reluctance of people to stand out is part of Shi Jian's mission. We need to "train people to think as individuals, to speak out, to express their opinions," says the producer of Speak the Truth. In the preface to a recent book, Shi Jian argues that "Chinese people have had too few opportunities to speak. They do not know where to start once they open their mouths... But Chinese people really want to express their views."
Shi Jian is not a dissident. Indeed, he seems to reflect the views of at least part of the political leadership: that China must create more thoughtful and critical citizens. Certainly, within the media ordinary Chinese no longer appear solely as flag-waving workers, singing peasants, applauding Party members. Now the views of the individual citizen are sought out by television consumer complaint shows, radio phone-ins, television and radio hot lines, or the ever-growing letters sections of the press. The people, or at least some of them, are having a say-even while the political leadership talks tough and clamps down on dissidents.
"Get closer, closer and yet closer to the people" was the Party's demand of the media in the wake of the tragedy at Tiananmen square ten years ago. "It used to be a case of 'We Broadcast, You Listen.' Now we listen to what the audience wants and then we broadcast it," says Beijing Economic Radio's Xuan Bei, having just attended one of her station's regular listener consultation meetings (attendance is compulsory for all department heads).
The new spirit at her station is evident in the two-year-old audience participation show Direct Line to City Government, which puts local government bureaucrats in the studio hot seat, subjecting them to the relative terror of the phone-in question-with only a few seconds delay as protection.
CCTV has its own stable of controversy-hunting programmes: Oriental Horizon (a 45 minute daily news magazine); News Research (a 45 minute weekly investigative programme); Focus Report (a 15 minute investigative programme); and Sons of the East (a weekly 15 minute interview show). Expos?s of corruption in local government and local police forces have made these some of China's most popular shows. Even Prime Minister Zhu Rong Ji has urged senior government officials and ministers to watch them, "so you know what ordinary people are watching." And because everyone knows that the leadership watches these shows, dozens of peasants and city people besiege the reception area of the CCTV network centre in west Beijing every day, in the hope of persuading a television journalist to investigate their complaints. This is the scruffy, often emotional face of the "people/media supervision of the government."
Opening the media is part of a wider attempt to create a closer identity between the people and the Party. At village level, this has led to a basic form of electoral accountability. So far nearly half of China's 930,000 villages have taken part in local elections for village officials-40 per cent of the successful candidates are not Communist Party members. More daring citizens have also been using the nascent court system-although mainly to resolve business and financial disputes.
Electoral democracy, greater judicial independence, and the opening up of the media can also be seen as stabilising the status quo. As the official China Reform News argued in late 1998, the media spotlight on corruption is useful because media silence could lead to more rampant corruption. "Any incident may trigger social turbulence if the public's patience runs out," the paper warned.
The media are taking advantage of the free rein they have been given. Stephen McGurk of the Ford Foundation argues that the environment, gender, economics and consumer issues are "all fair game for the media now." Journalists, feeling freer than ever before, are now being courted, lobbied and spun. "Often the government does listen closely to these debates and does act," says McGurk.
One such debate was over China's new love affair with the private car. Car manufacturers, steel makers, even banks keen to lend to prospective buyers, had dominated the debate. Then, two years ago, letters from women's groups and trade unions began to question this orthodoxy. They were followed by editorials advocating investment in public transport. "The terms of the policy debate changed completely; suddenly issues of the urban landscape, road design, even the powers of local government were raised," says McGurk.
The plight of Beijing's 100,000 migrant children is another example. Most Beijingers seemed to accept that these out-of-town children should be discouraged from staying in the city because they often become criminals. But then a 39-year-old researcher, Zhao Shu Kai from the State Council's Development Research Centre, began to expose how these children were treated. They were unable to attend school because of the high school fees imposed by Beijing municipal government. Their only education was provided by migrants themselves, in a mud hut next to a garbage dump, with planks as desks. "And a kilometre away there was a good government school standing empty," said Zhao.
Zhao persuaded a Beijing television station to cover the story, using pictures of innocent suffering children. Now the State Education Commission has ordered all urban schools to reduce their charges for migrants. For Zhao and his 39-year-old-wife-also a government researcher-this is a real victory, gained at some risk to their careers.
Fortunately for China, there seem to be many more like them. Liu Xiao-meng, who has made a study of the Cultural Revolution generation, argues that those in their late 30s and 40s are particularly non-materialistic, unlike the younger generation. But Liu also has much praise for the younger me-me generation. "They have a greater sense of democracy, they are not going to follow anyone blindly."
Shi Jian, 35, of Speak the Truth, straddles these generations. He is a risk-taker, but has retained a paternalist sense that he must serve the people by not necessarily giving them what they think they want. As I left him, he was pondering how to do a Speak the Truth on the rising number of divorces and the effect of divorce on children. He worries that many viewers of what would undoubtedly be a popular show could be left with the impression that divorce was always a disaster or that it was more common than it is. "I can't just think of ratings," he says.
