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Governing through reality television in contemporary China

The case of Hunan Satellite Television
Nauta, A.P.M.

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2021
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Nauta, A. P. M. (2021). Governing through reality television in contemporary China: The case
of Hunan Satellite Television. [Thesis, fully internal, Universiteit van Amsterdam].

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 Chapter 2 – Between Commercialism and
Politics: Television in China, 1958-2018

2.1 Introduction 35
2.2 The Inception of Broadcasting in the Mao Era, 1958-1976 37
2.3 Television in the Reform Era, 1976-2002 44
2.4 ‘Purifying Television’, 2002-2012 51
2.5 Digitization and Platformization in the Xi Jinping-Era, 57
2012-2018
2.6 Conclusion 63

39
2.1 Introduction

In the introductory chapter, I posed that the ‘entertainization’ of Chinese television

has been the result of the commercialization and marketization of the Chinese
television industry. Television stations became responsible for their own management
and finances, and yet retained their social-political function for the state: as a
governmental instrument for political communication. However, the introduction of
increasing regulations and censorship since the early 2000s suggest that friction exists
between the political and ideological imperatives of CCP officials on the one hand,
and the commercial imperatives of television stations, that are competing for viewer
ratings and advertising revenue, on the other hand (Bai 2016, 360; Keane 2016a).
In academic literature, the commercialization process has often been analyzed in
terms of the prevalent ‘authoritarian resilience’-paradigm (cf. Nathan 2003).
According to governance expert Pei Minxin, “the higher the level of marketization,
the greater the degree of self-liberalization. Strong market forces reduced the
effectiveness of government censorship of the media by multiplying the channels of
production and dissemination” (1994, 155). Since Pei published his argument,
however, academic discourse has nuanced (or contradicted) this point of view.
Nowadays, there is consensus that while commercialization has entailed a retreat in
explicit censorship, this has not been a retreat of the authorities, as they have
retrenched in other ways (cf. Sigley 2006): a calibration of government. Zhao Yuezhi
argued in 2000 that more obvious and open forms of control have gradually been
replaced by more astute and elusive ones, such as self-censorship and business-
government partnerships through conglomeration (Zhao 2000).
In her 2012 seminal work Media Commercialization and Authoritarian Rule in China,
Daniela Stockmann shows how the particular configurations of media
commercialization in China have actually worked to the advantage of the CCP, most
specifically in strengthening the stability and durability of the party-state, as “the
commercialized look of branding of marketized media induces readers to perceive
media sources as more credible” (2013, 5). Content analysis data indicate that
differences between ‘commercial’ and ‘state’ media are minimal, while branding
differences are vast. At the same time, “market demands constitute a potential

40
problem when news stories suggest dissatisfaction with the leadership or the rule of
the Party” (2013, 98). Recent scholarship has reached a consensus that media
commercialization has not eroded the stability of the party-state, but possibly even
strengthened it (Guo 2003; Zhao 2004; Fung 2009; Zhu 2012b; Zhang and Fung 2014).
The rise of digital media has further complicated this issue. In the 2010s, the
emergence of digital media and private internet companies have significantly
transformed the Chinese media and television landscape (Keane 2016a; CAC 2017, 19).
Video-on-demand platforms have enabled users to pick television shows from
curated catalogs of content, and watch them wherever (on mobile phones or tablets)
and whenever (no longer restricted by linear broadcasting) they want (Gillespie 2014;
van Dijck, Poell, and de Waal 2018). In China specifically, this platformization not
only marks “the penetration of economic, governmental, and infrastructural
extensions of digital platforms into the web and app ecosystems, fundamentally
affecting the operations of the cultural industries” (Nieborg and Poell 2018, 2), but also
transforms the power relationship within the television industrial landscape. With the
exception of LeTV, the largest platforms are now all subsidiaries of Baidu (iQiyi),
Alibaba (Youku), and Tencent (Tencent Video), the ‘big three’ Internet companies in
China (BAT), thus challenging the traditional monopoly of state-controlled television
stations (Jia and Winseck 2018).
In the context of this dissertation on the governmentalization through and within
reality television, these developments need further investigation: what does the loss
of state monopoly over television mean for television’s historical role as a
governmental instrument? In this chapter, I seek to unravel and explicate these
developments to elaborate the social-economic and political context in which
television making takes place nowadays. Why did the authorities allow this dualistic
system to emerge in the first place? What consequences did this have for television as
a governmental instrument? And what does the emergence of private platforms mean
for the Chinese television industry? By turning to these questions, this chapter
contextualizes the overarching questions leading this dissertation posed in the
introduction and forms a conceptual bridge to the following chapters on political
economy and the practice of production.

41
 Besides contextualizing, this chapter seeks to make three important
contributions: (1) explicating the dualistic logic of television making in China from a
political-economic perspective, (2) analyzing the changing role of television as a
governmentalizing instrument, and (3) exploring the consequences of digitization and
platformization for the former state monopoly over television. Here, I contextualize
the theoretical outline set out in the introduction: that television ‘governmentalizes’
through its mediating role between government and subjectivation by offering
individuals the resources for self-governance through mastering techniques to
condition, improve, and cultivate the self. How did television historically develop as
a governmental instrument?
This chapter is organized chronologically. In the first two sections, I discuss the
emergence of television as a governmental instrument in the Mao-era (1958-1976) and
the Reform-era (1976-2002) as well as the onset of commercialization reforms resulting
in the dualistic system. Subsequently, I will discuss in detail the governmental
backlash against the ‘entertainization’ of Chinese television, with HSTV leading the
vanguard. Finally, I turn to digitization and platformization of television, and its
consequences for television as a cultural instrument for governance in the context of
tightening regulations in the Xi Jinping-era. While these sections are chronologically
ordered, they are simultaneously somewhat resistant to categorization. I have chosen
to order these sections along major policy shift lines, which often coincided with a
change in political leadership. In addition, as this chapter moves through the
twentieth century in ‘seven-league boots,’ I have chosen to sometimes overlook the
ambiguities and complexities of events (such as the Cultural Revolution) for the sake
of clarity of the argument (cf. Pang 2017).

2.2 The Inception of Broadcasting in the Mao Era, 1958-1976

Older Chinese grew up with them: loudspeakers hanging on the roofs of buildings,
tall trees, and telephone poles, as well as public places such as schools, and factories.
In the 1960s, the communist government installed over 140 million loudspeakers,
aiming to reach every household in China’s vast countryside (Liu 1971; Nathan 1985,

42
163). China was long fragmented during the first half of the 20th century due to wars,
revolts, and warlords. The loudspeakers therefore constituted a landmark
development in not only the political use of broadcasting by the CCP, but also in the
unification of the country: now every Chinese household could be reached by the
single voice of the central CCP government (Jones 1992; 2014).
In August 1928, the Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) set up a ‘central
broadcasting station’ for radio broadcasting. The KMT declared that the CBS would
be used for political communication: to convey government decrees and propaganda
programs. In subsequent years, preceding the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in
1937, the KMT set up broadcasting stations in all major cities, using radio broadcasts
as political tool to discredit the CCP and promote its own policies. While private radio
stations did exist, political stations largely overshadowed them (Liu 1971, 119–29;
Huang and Yu 1997).
The Communists, for their part, also tried to use radio broadcasting as a political
tool. Mao Zedong had been a journalist himself in the late 1910s-early 1920s and
recognized the importance of controlling the media. However, the CCP lacked the
technology and resources to set up radio stations of its own and were thus restricted
to print media. Only in 1940, with a transmitter from Moscow, did the CCP manage
to set up its own radio station in Yunnan, the ‘Yunnan New China Radio Station’ (Chu
1978). Mao himself paid great attention to its political potential, stating in 1941 that
people in all liberated (i.e. communist-controlled) areas should listen to the radio
broadcasts, and should try every means possible to obtain a radio receiver set.
When the Communists defeated the Nationalists in 1949, and Mao proclaimed
the PRC, the Yunnan radio station was turned into ‘Central People’s Broadcasting
Station,’ offering a 15-hour daily service, of which half of the programs were devoted
to politics. In the 1950s, the Party’s ‘Central Press and Broadcasting Bureau (CPBB)’
stipulated that institutions, such as local governments, education institutes, factories,
and public organizations should all set up radio transmitting stations and
loudspeakers, followed in the 1960s by the earlier mentioned nationwide loudspeaker
program.
The penetration of everyday life by the speaker system even reached into the
intimate spaces of homes. Yan Yunxiang notes in his argument about the

43
collectivization of individual space in an agricultural commune that “in the early
1970s, Dadui village installed a loudspeaker in every home, typically right above the
bed. The loudspeakers had no on/off switches, and both the content and times of the
programming was determined by the county broadcast station.” The villagers thus
had no control over what they could hear, or when they would hear it, and were forced
to listen to official broadcasts (Yan 2006, 41; quoted in: Jones 2014, 49). The CCP thus
employed these new technological possibilities to extend their message everywhere,
including the confines of individual living spaces.

Picture 1. Speakers hanging from poles in a village near Changsha, Hunan (photo: Arjen
Nauta)

Televisions had been around in Western countries and the Soviet Union since the
1930s, but only entered China in 1958. This year marks the production of the first
television set in China, and the inception of the first TV station, Beijing Television
Station (BTS). The inception of television was again closely related to political
developments: on the one hand, Mei Yi, Mao’s propaganda chief, recalls how the set-
up of television in China happened in response to a technological threat; the news that
Taiwan was in the process of setting up its own television broadcasting service (Mei
1988). On the other hand, the development of television fitted in the context of the
Great Leap Forward (1958-1962). On 29 April 1958, two days before its first broadcast,

44
the CPBB proclaimed that BTS would have three main tasks: political propaganda,
education of the masses, and cultural enrichment (Guo 2003). BTS went on air two
days per week, for two to three hours, while the black-and-white broadcasts only
reached the Beijing area. The listings for the first day of broadcast, 1 May 1958, give a
clear indication of its programming:

19:05 Model workers talk about the political significance of the ‘Great Leap
Forward’
19:15 Political documentary ‘Going to the countryside’
19:25 Poems and dances: art performances
19:50 Scientific and educational documentary from the Soviet Union

In the context of the Great Leap Forward, in the subsequent two years many new TV
stations went on air, despite a notable lack of transmitting equipment, and
technological knowhow. Sixteen of China’s twenty-nine provinces set up TV stations
by 1960, but there were only several hundred receivers in every province. Ordinarily,
only senior party members had access to a television set, and private television
ownership was discouraged due to “political considerations” (Guo 1989; 1998).
The start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 put a quick end to the slow
efflorescence of television in China. Whereas radio broadcasting played a key role in
the ‘mobilization of the masses,’ television had been limited to senior party cadres,
which formed an important target of the ‘all-out revolution.’ By January 1967, only
Shanghai TV and Guangzhou TV were still in operation, albeit on a very limited and
irregular basis. Mao’s instructions were all broadcast over the radio waves—the
loudspeakers playing a key role in quickly disseminating his guiding instructions to
the masses.
In 1969, TV stations were allowed to resume broadcasting, and new stations were
established in each of China’s provinces (including provincial-level municipalities,
and autonomous regions) with the exception of Tibet. However, reception was very
limited; it was estimated that in 1972, there were between 100,000 and 300,000 TV sets
in China. Production increased considerably, from 170,000 per year in 1975, to
1,000,000 in 1979, but this number was still low relative to China’s population. Private

45
ownership was further limited due to their high cost: a television set cost around $250,
while the average salary of a state employee amounted to around 40$ per month (Chu
1978, 37).
During the first years of the Cultural Revolution, entertainment-oriented
programs disappeared almost completely from the airwaves—only revolutionary
opera’s selected by Jiang Qing were broadcast. Timothy Green mentions how a Hong
Kong-based NBC team monitored the broadcasts of Guangzhou TV for three weeks
in January 1970. Its schedule commenced at 19:00 with the appearance of Mao’s
portrait and the singing of ‘The East is Red’—China’s de facto national anthem during
the CR. Then followed a newscast with filmed stories on topics such as the work of
educated youth in a remote village, the commemoration of a people’s hero, visits from
foreign dignitaries, and the struggle of the North Vietnamese against the American
‘imperialists.’ Next in the listing was revolutionary ballet and old Chinese films—
usually about the Second Sino-Japanese War or the struggle against the Nationalists.
Occasionally, subtitled North Korean, Albanian, or North Vietnamese movies
featured, as Soviet productions were banned after the Sino-Soviet rift in the early
1960s. At 10:30, the broadcast stopped. Although there were no commercials, Green
states that “the audience cannot escape the bombardment of Marxism—the Chinese
substitute for commercials—at any moment of the telecasts” (Green 1972, 247–49).
Interestingly, within the CCP, divergent opinions emerged on the issue of media
policy and television. On the one hand, the Maoists regarded broadcasting as a tool of
ideological purification and political propaganda for ‘continuous revolution’—to
address the masses directly, calling for mass mobilizations and campaigns to involve
the whole population in revolutionary struggle. As an editorial in the People’s Daily
characterized this approach, “in every job we undertake, we must always insist that
politics take command and let political and ideological work come before anything
else” (Jin 1999, 17–18). In this thought-determining approach, broadcasting aimed to
serve the Party to maintain full political and ideological control and to directly move
the masses into action.
On the other hand, the Reformists, led by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping,
favored a state paternalistic approach, comparable to media policy in the Soviet Union
and its satellite states (Huang and Yu 1997, 569–70). This approach placed more

46
emphasis on the role of the state apparatus in achieving national integration and
modernization, combined with a need for political and ideological control. This
approach underscored the importance of edifying audiences within the frame of
reference of ‘correct’ ideological values and prioritized modernization,
professionalization, and institutionalization. It thus recognized the role of
broadcasting in developing and promoting national cultural values and education.
The first television broadcasts were heavily laden with political propaganda; the
tone was dogmatic, while the technical quality was poor. The Sino-Soviet rift (between
1956-1966) compounded this latter issue, leading to a withdrawal of investment and
technical assistance from the Soviet bloc. In 1960, Beijing TV engaged in self-criticism,
calling its own reporting ‘dull,’ ‘monotonous,’ and ‘insipid’ (Guo 1989). In 1961, Liu
and Deng, advocating the state paternalist approach, challenged the extreme focus on
politics, considering that politics would lose its meaning when discussed at every
breath. They instead called for professionalization and serving audiences by catering
to popular taste. Beijing TV acquiesced to their suggestions and emphasized diversity
and quality, leading to a reduction in blatant propaganda programs. As Mei Yi
claimed, “TV programs should be closer related to the daily lives of ordinary
people”—a trope which still resounds at Chinese television stations today (see chapter
4; Mei 1988). The new policy greatly encouraged the production of educative and
entertaining programs to meet the wishes of audiences. One example was the setup
of a ‘television university,’ offering courses in literature, science, and foreign
languages. Another was the broadcasting of a light entertainment variety show, which
soon triggered condemnations such as ‘vulgar,’ ‘superficial’, and ‘low taste’, terms
that would consistently reverberate through the future of Chinese television, up to
today (Zhao and Guo 2005; Bai 2015a).
From its inception, Chinese television stations also featured foreign programs.
China had signed bilateral agreements of cooperation in broadcasting with the Soviet
Union, and its European satellite states, as well as other socialist countries, such as
North Korea, North Vietnam, Albania, and Cuba by the late 1950s. In 1959 only, China
imported 1000 programs, mostly from Hungary (459) and—until the Sino-Soviet rift—
the Soviet Union (349), mostly news and current affairs programs, but also films and
drama series. Around 30% of programming on Chinese television originated from

47
other socialist states—unsurprisingly, China’s audiovisual exchanges with Western
capitalist states were minimal.
At this stage, the Chinese government completely financed television. The state
allocated around 1,6m RMB to each television station for hardware and operating
costs such as staff salaries. In later stages, before the CR took off in 1966, this increased
to around $400,000-500,000 per year. At the same time, the production, dissemination,
and exchanges of programs was directly arranged by the state without any monetary
involvements. Television stations basically had unlimited access to state-produced
and sponsored cultural resources, such as foreign programs, opera’s, sports events,
dramas, and movies. In the 1960s, movies were commonly broadcast on TV several
weeks before their premiere. At the same time, censorship was strict: while the CCP
recognized the need for entertainment television, it banned programs which were
deemed ‘reactionary,’ ‘feudalistic,’ or ‘vulgar.’
The inception of television in Mao-era China show the contours of pivotal future
debates about the role of television in China, the balancing act between
ideology/propaganda and entertainment, as well as the dependence on foreign
programming. Yet the reach of televised broadcasts was still very limited: in 1976, the
year of Mao’s death, it was estimated that there were 3m TV sets in China, a relatively
small number on a population of 931 million (Guo 1998, 123; World Bank 2017). Two
historical developments had considerable influence on the development of television
in China: the first was the Sino-American rapprochement in the early 1970s,
culminating in Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972. As Yuezhi Zhao and Zhenzhi
Guo note, “the professional and technological sophistication of the three US television
networks that transmitted live reports of Nixon’s visit via satellite back to American
audiences had a powerful impression on their Chinese hosts” (2005, 523). While the
Soviets facilitated the introduction of television to China, the experience with the
Americans provided a reference point for the future. The second development was
the economic reform policy that Deng Xiaoping implemented starting in the late 1970s:
only through these reforms could television become a widespread mass medium.

48
2.3 Television in the Reform Era, 1976-2002

The death of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai in 1976, and the subsequent defeat of the
‘Gang of Four,’ marked a transition point in Chinese history and the beginning of the
reform era. Deng Xiaoping emerged as the paramount leader and quickly embarked
on an extensive program of economic reforms. In this time, television emerged as an
important symbol of modernization. While there had only been 3m TV sets in China
in 1976, this number grew to 4,85m in 1979, then exploded to 27,6m 1982, and
continued to grow exponentially. Wen Huike shows how the government changed its
stance and promoted private ownership of television sets through coded images in
periodicals and other publications (2014). Television programs were revamped and
foreign content from non-communist countries became very popular. According to
Sun Wanning, Chinese audiences were eager to learn about the outside world, and
the visuality of TV “acquired paramount importance for image-hungry Chinese
audiences” (2002, 72).
Most studies of Chinese television focus on the 1980s and later periods,
concurring with China’s ‘opening up’ to the world. Broadly speaking, there is a
notable gap between domestic research and works published by non-Chinese or
foreign-based Chinese. The latter mostly focuses on how political and economic
power and cultural factors have interacted with Chinese policy in the administration
of the television industry (Hong 1998; Zhao 1998; Donald, Keane, and Hong 2002; Lee
2003; Curtin 2007; Zhao 2008; Keane 2015), whereas domestic scholarship generally
has a more policy-based focus, focusing on issues such as how to best regulate TV in
order to serve as an instrument for political purposes. Thus, while both strands of
scholarship are seemingly opposed, their meta-concern is markedly similar: the ways
in which economic reforms have influenced and reshaped the Chinese television
industry, in relation to global media industries.
Several reforms significantly impacted the development of television in reform-
era China. First, between 1978 and 1983, the radio and television policy was
overhauled. In 1978, Beijing TV was renamed China Central Television (CCTV), as the
first centrally controlled national television station. More provincial stations were
established in the years thereafter, but the largest increase came with the

49
implementation of the ‘four level administrative guidelines’ in 1983, in order to
develop radio and television broadcasting at four administrative levels: national,
provincial, prefectural, and county (Hong 2002). Second, advertisements were
introduced, marking the start of a transformation of the Chinese television industry
from a state-sponsored propaganda operation to a market-driven entertainment-
focused mass medium, with both commercial and propagandistic objectives. Third,
the provision of television programs became market oriented. State-owned
production studios, concerned with their own economic benefits, no longer provided
programs free of charge. This led to two related developments: the set-up of local
production capacity by television stations, and, as market mechanisms were
introduced in the production and distribution of televised entertainment, a dramatic
increase in foreign television imports (Zhao and Guo 2005). Especially Japanese
cartoons and drama series quickly became ravenously popular, while transnational
corporations immediately recognized television as an excellent advertisement vehicle
for their products in the slowly opening Chinese market.
The foreign televisual imports quickly set a new benchmark for the Chinese TV
industry, and production capacity increased enormously. With the increasing demand
for local programs by the rising number of stations and the new forms of funding, the
Central Broadcasting Administration announced in 1979 that TV stations might now
produce their own television drama and organized a national TV drama exhibition.
CCTV’s opening of its own production center 1983 marked another benchmark in the
exponential growth of TV drama production. The table below aptly illustrates the
enormous increase in drama production:

50
 Year Nr. of Increase Index Year Nr. of Increase Index
dramas per year (1978 = dramas per year (1978 =
produced 100) produced 100
1978 8 100 1983 428 89% 5350
1979 20 150% 250 1984 740 73% 9250
1980 131 555% 1638 1985 1300 76% 16250
1981 128 -2,3% 1600 1986 1400 7,7% 17500
1982 227 77% 2838 1987 1500 7,1% 18750
Table 3.1 Television drama production in China, 1978-1987. The number of dramas per year
is taken from (Y. Hong 2002, 30). Calculations by the author.

The number of privately-owned TV sets increased concomitantly in the 1980s, thus

increasing the audience base considerably—from 4,85 mln. in 1979 to 150 mln. in 1990
(Lull 1991, 23). During these years, television drama took over from cinema as the
most popular audiovisual narrative product.
The transformation and pluralization of Chinese television provided a highly
overt arena of interplay, perhaps better described as a battleground, between
conflicting social forces in the process of reform. On the one hand, the CCP promoted
television as instrument of modernization and maintaining political control, while on
the other hand, grassroots demands for interesting and entertaining content and
concomitant advertisement revenues led to limited commercialization but also
established TV as a primary site of contestation for different political and social forces
(Lull 1991). Commercialization slowly started to permeate the television industry but
was still limited: considerations such as target audiences, ratings, advertisement
contracts, product placements, and niche markets were not heard of yet. In this
liberalizing political climate, television provided a conceptual window for the
dissemination of discourses propagating not only modernization and global
integration, but even overt democratization. The six-part documentary series River
Elegy (河殇 [heshang]), first broadcasted on 12 June 1988 on CCTV, best illustrates this
relatively liberal political climate in the 1980s.
River Elegy provided an impassionate critique of Chinese civilization,
symbolized by a rough Yellow River that personifies China’s feudalistic peasant-

51
based, inward-looking society vis-à-vis the modern West, which is ‘occidentalized’ as
the reified symbol of democracy, openness, and technological progress (Field 1991;
Chen 1995). Throughout the series, ‘elegy’ stands for the death of this society: if
Chinese civilization remains feudal and stagnate, what hope is there for progress? In
a rather elitist argument, it turns out to be the intellectuals, who are sensitive to the
progresses of Westernization that form the last beacon of hope for Chinese civilization.
As the narrator notes in the last episode: “they hold in their hands the weapon to
destroy ignorance and superstition; it is they who can conduct a direct dialogue with
seafaring civilization; it is they who can channel the blue sweet-water spring of science
and democracy onto our yellow earth” (Selden 1991, 3). While the CCP is not
mentioned as such, the series singles out the peasantry of Yan’an (the longtime base
of Mao and the Communists before 1949) as representation of the backwardness and
poverty of rural China, thus clearly conflating the Mao-era with China’s history of
feudalism. In this way, River Elegy is closely reminiscent of the ideological conflict
within the CCP, where traditionalists (such as Deng and Li Peng) clashed with
progressive reformers, such as Zhao Ziyang. However, at the same time, it
represented the ‘high culture fever’ of the mid-1980s, drawing upon intellectual
sources to construct a discourse of national crisis, provoking its audience to think
about China’s future (Wang 1996; Zhao and Guo 2005; Vogel 2013, 599).
Programs such as River Elegy epitomize the status of television as platform for
‘high culture’: indeed, in this time, television entertainment was never conceptualized
as yule (娱乐 [entertainment]), but as wenyi (文艺 [arts and literature]). Even the term
television drama, dianshiju (电视剧), refers to drama as a kind of ‘high art.’ This fits
within the dominant mode of governance at the time: making China better, ensuring
its prosperity and rightful place on the world stage—improving the ‘value’ of the body
politic. In the reform movement, the representation of value underwent a recalibration
in the biopolitical realm in which the human life became a new object of measurement
for quality, termed ‘suzhi’ (素质) in Chinese. This term became conjoined with the idea
of population in the reform-era.
The discourse of population quality (人口素质 [renkou suzhi]) first emerged in
state documents in 1980, which attributed China’s failure to modernize to the ‘low
quality’ (低素质 [di suzhi]) of the (rural) population (Anagnost 2004, 190). ‘Population’

52
was brought within the orbit of state management, which sought to transform China
demographically: it implemented birth control as a policy to reduce the quantity of
the population, while at the same time promoting an increase in its quality. Television
was assigned to play an important role in the ‘suzhi’- project.
The relatively liberal television policy in the 1980s ended abruptly with the
Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Much of the events were broadcasted on
television; whereas journalists and television makers largely supported the reform
movement, the CCP was initially paralyzed due to internal divisions between the two
opposing camps. According to James Lull, television helped mobilize and legitimize
the movement with its sympathetic coverage of the protests (Lull 1991, 188–89).
Concurrently, media freedom became an important rallying cry for the student
protestors and reformist sympathizers in general. The freedom to cover the June 1989
events on television proved to be a unique moment in Chinese media history, as well
as a short-lived one: when the traditionalists led by Deng Xiaoping crushed the
protests and the reformist movement, they simultaneously reasserted political control
over the television industries.
The crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protesters marked a watershed
movement not only in Chinese political history, but also for television. First, CCP
control was re-established. Its leadership re-emphasized television’s role as a
governmental instrument for the proliferation of propagandistic messages as well as
maintaining ideological control: television now had to toe the government line in
terms of acceptable content, retreating from contemporary political debates. Second,
the pace of marketization reforms increased considerably, in response to the collapse
of the Soviet Union and its client regimes. The year 1992 marks an important
development in this regard, when Deng Xiaoping made a speech during his Southern
Tour about ‘taking bolder steps’ in economic reform and the goal of creating a socialist
market economy (Vogel 2013, 669–84). The television industry (as well as other media
outlets) would be run according to principles of market-based financing (i.e.
advertisements) and profit making. Market forces thus quickly swept through the
Chinese television industry, while ideological control remained firmly in the hands of
the Party. Third, the ‘high-culture’-TV of the 1980s gradually transformed to a greater
focus on entertainment. While the suzhi-discourse concerning the biopolitical

53
improvement of population quality prevailed, it worked through in more opaque
ways in the 1990s and later.
The 51-episode drama series Yearnings (渴望 [kewang]) is characteristic of this
new direction of Chinese television in the 1990s. First broadcast in January 1991 on
CCTV, and written by novelists Wang Shuo and Zheng Wanlong, the series took
China by storm: while the story was originally programmed three times per week, its
popularity caused CCTV to broadcast the show for three hours every night. The show
was produced by the Beijing Television Arts Centre according to the format and
conventions of Hong Kongese, Taiwanese, and Japanese dramas as well as Latin
American telenovelas. Yin Hong describes the show as “a genuine industrial product:
it was made with financial support from non-state sources, and shot in a studio,
utilizing artificial indoor scenes, multicamera shots, simultaneous voice recording,
and post-production techniques” (2002, 32). The story revolves around the
intertwining lives and tragedies of two families: one working class, the other
‘intellectuals’ (actually state functionaries masquerading as such). Its main character
is Liu Huifang, an attractive young woman who deals with issues such as marriage,
love, betrayal, children, and parent-child relations in the historical context of the
Cultural Revolution through the late 1980s. According to Geremie Barmé, the show’s
success “relies on the mesmerizing qualities of a tortured yet appealing tale depicted
in the prurient tones of schlock TV,” thereby falling into the trap of dismissing
entertainment TV as trashy (1999, 103).
How could this drama series told through a personal prism on family relations
bring about such viewer ratings? In the West, The New York Times suggested that
Yearnings was popular as “most Chinese television programming is extraordinarily
boring,” relating it to the alleged fact that “the soap opera has virtually no Communist
content.” One anonymous Western diplomat is quoted on the lack of explicit political
content, saying “it’s as if the government said ‘we’re the leaders, so we better run after
the people and get in front of them with this thing [a call for more entertaining
programming—AN]” (WuDunn 1991). However, Lisa Rofel clearly places Yearnings
in a socio-political context of the seemingly ambivalent state efforts to combine
socialism with a free-market economy: “Yearnings embodied the desires set loose by
those transformations, as well as the resulting cultural dilemmas about what would

54
count as ‘moral’” (1994, 701). Whereas Rofel recounts how Chinese audiences viewed
Yearnings as lacking the obvious political themes closely associated with the state,
meanings that have circulated through post-Mao official discourse were laced through
the series’ narrative: “the deep ambivalence about intellectuals, the use of gender in
the creation of that which is called ‘personal life,’ and the assertion of a personal
sphere that is felt to exist apart from the state have all been state projects. Indeed, one
of the major visions of the state about itself since the Cultural Revolution is its claim
to noninterference in that space which has come into existence as ‘the personal’” (1994,
715).
Yearnings symbolized a watershed moment in Chinese television history, in three
interrelated developments. First, it symbolized a reconfiguration of the relation
between TV, the personal, and the state (cf. Shue 1990). While the series sparked
considerable controversy, Li Ruihuan, member of the Standing Committee of the CCP
Politburo, responsible for culture and ideology, praised the show publicly for
promoting what he called socialist ethics and morals while expressing the hope that
other series would similarly seek to inculcate “unconsciously and imperceptibly” (不
知不觉, 潜移默化 [buzhi bujue, qianyi mohua]) positive values in Chinese television
viewers (Xiao 2015, appendix 1; cf. Barmé 1999, 101–7). This statement signified
official approval for television programs as morality plays of national unity and
stability packed in entertainment and simultaneously contradicts Rofel’s recognition
of an assertion of a personal sphere on television.
However, the national controversy that erupted in China over Yearnings was
produced through the manner in which this seemingly innocuous and apolitical
drama narrativized political allegories of nation-ness, which generated a range of
ambiguous but distinct meanings at the same time. As Rofel shows, people seized
upon these ambiguities and ambivalences within the story to challenge the potential
hegemony within this text, but also by implicit extension, to the domains in which the
debates took hold (1994, 714). In a similar vein, another popular 1991-1992 series,
Stories from the editorial board (编辑部的故事 [bianjibu de gushi]), also co-written by
Wang Shuo, featured satirical dialogues and situations that amounted to veiled
critiques of contemporary Chinese society (Kong 2004, 27).

55
 Second, non-state funding through advertising and business sponsoring became
the primary business model in the Chinese TV industry. Whereas in 1989, the
advertising sales in television totaled 561mn renminbi, this had increased by 1992 to
2,05bn renminbi, amounting to an increase of around 100% per year between 1989 and
1992. Simultaneously, other forms of non-advertising commercial sponsorship and
business became important as well, such as license deals with foreign companies, co-
sponsoring deals with outside institutions (such as universities or government
agencies), and financial sponsorship (such as companies providing the prizes for
game shows) (Huang 1994). Third, entertainment programming became mainstream
fair on Chinese television screens, albeit wrapped in a nationalist discourse revolving
around ‘traditional’ morals and values, as well as a new focus on the personal. Chinese
television changed rapidly.

2.4 Purifying Television, 2002-2012

By the late 1990s, the number of television stations had grown exponentially. It
became difficult for the authorities to effectively control them, and too few of them
acquired sufficient viewership in order to warrant their existence. The Central
Propaganda Department (CPD) responded by restricting the issue of new
broadcasting licenses and revoking some existing ones (Zhao 2000). Moreover, by
October 1999, all provincial television stations had launched a satellite channel (with
nationwide coverage), in addition to the eleven CCTV satellite channels and three
education channels (Wang 2002). The Asian economic crisis of 1997, which purported
a slump in advertisement incomes, as well as the approaching entry to the World
Trade Organization in December 2001, provided the political-economic context for
further reforms in Chinese television.
In the early 2000s, marketization reforms reached their full extent, impelled by
the state policy on ‘cultural system reform,’ which formally divides cultural
production into two components: public cultural institutions and commercial cultural
industries (State Council 2003). Central to this policy was the idea of “spinning off
market-oriented operations from existing party-state media conglomerates and

56
turning these operations into relatively autonomous market entities that are free to
absorb outside capital and pursue market-oriented expansion” (State Council 2003).
In practice, the policy led to the reorganization of media organizations into large
conglomerates, such as the Hunan Broadcasting System (HBS), which owns HSTV,
the Shanghai Media Group (SMG), which controls Dragon TV (DFTV) and the China
Media Group (CMG), in charge of CCTV (Xinhua 2018a). These media conglomerates
dominated the entire production and distribution chain of Chinese television,
competing amongst each other to secure and expand their market share.
Here, the latent incoherence ingrained in the dualistic logic between political and
commercial imperatives has come clearly to the fore. With HSTV leading the way,
entertainment television rapidly became the main fare on Chinese television screens
in the late-1990s (see chapter 3). The flood of reality-based entertainment programs
led to a governmental backlash in the 2000s. Between 2002 and 2012, coinciding with
the fourth-generation leaders, presided over by Hu Jintao, SAPPRFT issued a set of
decrees to ‘purify television’ (净化荧屏 [jinghua yingping]). This campaign sought to
reign in those programs considered to promote vulgar, narcissistic, and materialistic
values. As Ruoyun Bai states: “Chinese television viewers are bombarded with messy,
contradictory messages promoting altruism, patriotism, collectivism, family values,
and Confucian ethics, while trumping the same by embracing consumerism,
individualism, hedonism, cynicism, and moral agnosticism” (2015a, 71). In a position
highly reminiscent of similar discussions in other countries (Hill 2005, 7–9), the CCP
concluded that Chinese television failed to contribute to a healthy moral society
because of the excessive tendencies of entertainment programming under the pressure
of commercialization.
With ‘harmony’ and ‘stability’ as keywords of Hu’s term, the purification
campaign sought to take this to the media, using the media to promote a symbolic
environment conducive to stability. In practice, this meant conveying a positive image
of CCP-rule and reigning in programs that might lead to controversies or disrupt the
public order. The discourse of maintaining harmony and stability gave a clear
orientation to regulatory practices, leading to a situation where on the one hand,
marketization processes continued in the media landscape, while on the other hand
regulatory control actually intensified (Brady 2009, 106–9; Zhao 2008).

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 This discourse of the vulgarity of television entertainment dovetails with the
discourse of moral crisis that has permeated dominant discourse in China—in the
public sphere as well as government policy. Whether this crisis is real or imagined,
what matters is that the discourse is pervasive and powerful in China, and that has
been central to the self-legitimation efforts of the CCP. Corruption for example, has
been interpreted as a problem of morality (Bai 2015b). Since 2002, the CCP has sought
to position itself as the moral center in Chinese society. The alleged vulgarity and
immorality of entertainment television clearly implicated the media as part of this
moral crisis and forms the background of the ‘Purify Television’ campaign. Television
needed to be restored as an instrument promoting the ‘correct’ values and reigning in
the excesses implicated in the ongoing commercialization.
According to the SAPPRFT-issued ‘Plan to Strengthen and Improve Moral
Thinking of Minor to be Implemented by the Broadcast Sector,’ 10 types of content
needed to be removed: (1) violence, (2) superstition and religion, (3) sex and
obscenities, (4) selfishness and materialist values, (5) drugs and gambling, (6)
tastelessness and vulgarity of hosts (in dressing and style), (7) non-Putonghua Chinese
(i.e. Hong Kong or Taiwan idioms, dialects, new words), (8) intrusion in the private
sphere (no sleeping rooms), (9) crimes by children and young adults, and (10) online
gaming (including gambling) (SAPPRFT 2017). These restrictions had considerable
consequences in the domain of reality television, especially for HSTV.
SAPPRFT reacted immediately to the success of the 2005 Supergirl contest. They
allowed a 2006 version to run, but attached several conditions to contain its impact
and regulate the participants’ behavior: judges were not allowed to publicly
embarrass contestants, contestants must be 18 years or older, and regional contests
(which take place before the national contest) could not be broadcast on the satellite
channel. In August 2007, Wang Taihua, director of SAPPRFT stated that another wave
of ‘purification’ was on its way, “resolutely resisting the wind of vulgarity” as primary
objective and focusing on entertainment and talent contests in particular. This was
followed in September by (1) a detailed stipulation concerning the purported behavior
of contestants, hosts, and judges, (2) a prohibition on audience voting through SMS’s,
phone, or Internet, and a restriction on time slots: talent contests could not be

58
broadcast between 19:30 and 22:30 (Keane and Zhang 2016). Nonetheless, SAPPRFT
banned Supergirl in 2007.
JSTV’s dating show If you are the one, launched in 2010, became an enormous
audience hit, and the next big target of the campaign. In its first year, the show became
embroiled in a series of controversies. One of the contestants, Ma Nuo, achieved
notoriety by telling a male contestant that she’d rather be crying in the back of a BMW,
than sit on the back of his bicycle smiling. Another female contestant, when asked by
a male contestant if he could shake her hand, she stated that only her boyfriend could
touch her hands, while others would have to pay 200,000 yuan. Nude pictures of
another popular female candidate were circulated over the Internet. SAPPRFT
responded in the same year, by issuing a decree on the regulations for dating shows.
Individuals holding ‘incorrect’ or ‘materialist’ views on love and marriage, or espouse
‘unhealthy’ morals and values, would be excluded from the show (Kong 2014; Li 2014;
Luo and Sun 2014; Sun 2014).
The CCP seemed to regard Supergirl and If you are the one as epitomizing a
vulgarizing trend in Chinese television (and perhaps media outlets in general). In July
2010 namely, Hu Jintao stated during a speech to the Politburo that while
marketization reforms should deepen in China’s cultural industries, simultaneously,
“cultural workers and cultural units adhere to the socialist core values and socialist
advanced culture, and manifestly resist the tendencies of vulgarity and crudeness.
Hu’s speech was quickly followed by comments from other party dignitaries, such as
Sun Zhijun, deputy head of the CPD, laying blame on television entertainment for
China’s cultural degradation. In a speech, he referred to vulgar television programs
as “cultural trash that is corrupting for people’s minds and morals” (Sun 2010).
In October 2011, SAPPRFT issued a new series of regulations for satellite
channels on television entertainment to prevent excessive entertainment and
vulgarization. They targeted all reality-based programs, including dating shows,
variety shows, and talent contests, and are colloquially referred to by my interviewees
as the ‘restrict entertainment order’ (限娱令 [xian yu ling]). The new regulations restrict
the amount of reality shows per channel to two per year, while no more than nine
could be broadcasted among all satellite channels on a single day. In addition, in place
of reality shows, satellite channels must broadcast a minimum of two hours of news

59
between 6AM and midnight, of which two news programs (of 30 minutes each)
between 6PM and 11PM. Finally, each satellite station is required to establish a
morality building program to promote Chinese culture and morality, as well as
socialist core values (Xie 2011; Yang 2011; Xiao 2012; Gorfinkel 2018, 71).
Chapter 4 clearly shows how the regulatory zeal is by no means a zero-sum game:
a better characterization is a parent-child metaphor where some rules are strictly
enforced, while others are considerably watered down, circumvented, or neglected
entirely. What matters here is that this reading of regulatory edicts clearly suggests
that Chinese television has neglected its primary functions: promoting core socialist
values and uplifting people’s minds, in the meantime producing entertainment that
destabilizes morality, Chinese values, and serious thinking. While never referred to
specifically, SAPPRFT identifies commercialization as the main reason: the rise of ‘low
quality’ reality-based entertainment television, is a direct consequence of
marketization and the inducement to attract as many eyeballs as possible (see also
chapter 3).
Moreover, whenever a successful program storms the market, numerous
copycats pop up on Chinese television channels, adding to the quantity and
concentration of pure entertainment programming, causing ‘imbalance’ according to
SAPPRFT (Keane 2015). Herein lies the rationale for redistributing prime-time slots
between news programs and entertainment genres including reality TV. While If you
are the one was problematic for its materialism and money fetishism, even family
mediation reality shows can be problematic: they “are primarily interested in
exposing private matters and sexual affairs, staging the dark psyche (…) as a result,
instead of mediating conflicts and providing guidance, they actually gratify some
people’s desires to peek into others’ privacy or see other fall, thereby having a
misleading effect on people’s value system” (Bai 2015a, 80). The purification campaign
can therefore clearly be seen as a reaction to the perception that television has turned
into a theater of vulgarity, thus contradicting Party views on television as an
ideological and governmental instrument.
It is crucial here to establish that the ‘vulgar entertainment’ the purify television
campaign seeks to address, is a symptom. SAPPRFT policy is reactionary, responding
to perceived problems recurring in different models (sometimes talent contests, at

60
other times mediation programs or crime dramas) without tackling the structural
formation that underlies the emergence of these symptoms in the first place. As the
above elaboration on marketization reforms, especially in the case of HSTV shows, the
current political economy forces television stations to maximize audience ratings.
SAPPRFT’s policy will thus remain reactionary and rather ineffective unless the
underlying structural formation (the political economy) is addressed (see chapters 3
and 4).
As stated before, it goes too far to speak about a disjunctive relationship between
the structurally fragmented television industry and the ideological and moral order
that the CCP espouses (cf. Stockmann 2013). However, the issues remain unsolved
until this day: there is a distinct dualistic logic that has come about as a direct
consequence of the marketization reforms in the Chinese television industry. First,
policymaking and regulation has been driven by political (TV as governmental
instrument) and economic (marketization) incentives. Second, this ambiguous logic of
political conformity as well as commercial imperatives has been amplified by
individual TV stations such as HSTV: focusing on entertainment has logically
emerged as a primary business strategy by avoiding the explicitly political while
catering to viewers’ preferences. Third, this posed a challenge to the monopoly of
CCTV. Whereas CCTV was ideologically close to the CCP and sought to balance
between entertainment and ‘high quality’ programming, HSTV and other satellite
channels were less bound to such ideological imperatives. Fourth, the entrance of
private capital in the production of reality-based television (through advertising and
product placement) has strained the relationship with the authorities, leading to an
alliance between TV stations and private investors that is mutually beneficial. Fifth,
audiences are conceived of as both economic consumers and political subjects, while
TV stations need to find a balance between excessive consumerism and moral
responsibility. Thus, tensions are both economic (as provincial satellite stations
compete with CCTV and one another) and ideological (as these stations eschew their
function of moral agent and are thereby conceived as a negative force in the dominant
moral crisis discourse. While SAPPRFT has functioned as a reactionary instrument in
the process, the digitization of the television market and the entrance of China’s
biggest companies (Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent) in the market of television platforms

61
has further complicated the structural formation in the industry. In the next section, I
turn to the consequences of digitization and its political economy, as well as the role
of the authorities in the Xi-era.

2.5 Digitization and Platformization in the Xi Jinping Era, 2012-2018

The emergence of digital television has revolutionized the logic of production and
distribution both around the world and in China (Doyle 2010; Bai 2016; Keane 2016a;
Lotz 2017). At first, cheap compression and reproduction technologies made it
possible for people to access content on DVDs or via illegal downloading or streaming
websites. While many were closed down during a large-scale crackdown on peer-to-
peer (P2P) video-sharing websites (Zhao and Keane 2013), a few online video
providers have emerged, introducing new ways of producing, distributing, and
consuming audiovisual entertainment material. Through digital affordances such as
big data and machine learning, video-on-demand platforms have enabled users to
pick television shows from algorithmically curated catalogs of content, replacing the
human-centered editorial model of broadcast television (Gillespie 2014). Online video
platforms in China, such as iQiyi, Tencent Video, Youku, and LeTV, like Netflix and
Western video platforms and SVOD-services, are data-driven companies that
algorithmically curate user-specific content to optimize distribution (Lobato 2018;
Curtin and Li 2018).
Relatively little has changed in terms of production, as new video platforms
produce content largely in the same way as broadcast television (Keane and Zhao
2016). However, the rise of user-generated content and platforms for sharing (such as
Bilibili) constitute a major development in this regard, as a new affordance of
digitization. As Elaine Jing Zhao has shown, while online videos have historically
been grounded in grassroots creativity, they have undergone a process of
formalization and commercialization, culminating in the wave of micro-movies (Zhao
2014). Online video platforms, production companies, as well as state television
stations have all engaged in micro-movie production, and advertisers have frequently

62
funded them—illustrating the way in which video providers have adjusted to the
changing industry landscape and the affordances of digitization.
In addition, the consumption of television content is not limited to TV screens:
people can watch television however (on mobile phones or tablets), wherever (no
longer restricted by the static location of the television screen) and whenever (no
longer restricted by linear broadcasting) they want. As Michael Keane observes, “the
Chinese television industry has become a cross-platform entity with large digital
companies providing the impetus for the generation of original content, which can be
measured more effectively by ‘hits’ than by conventional ratings” (Keane 2016a, 5432).
In China, 92% of all internet users watch online video content, either on computers or
smartphones (Statista 2018). Especially younger audiences now prefer online
streaming to traditional TV channels: in 2016, 90.6% of the post-1990s generation
regularly visited video websites, while 71.7% uses many different video websites
(CIW 2016).
In China specifically, this platformization not only marks “the penetration of
economic, governmental, and infrastructural extensions of digital platforms into the
web and app ecosystems, fundamentally affecting the operations of the cultural
industries” (Nieborg and Poell 2018, 2), but has also overhauled the power
relationships within the television industrial landscape (CAC 2017, 19).
First, it has proved a considerable challenge for cultural governance mechanisms
that have proven effective in the past and are tailored to a media landscape of a small
number of conglomerates that reach a vast audience through delivery technologies
that can easily be monitored. However, as content-creating users are not tied to the
propaganda system nor to the commercial incentives that govern the television
industry, governance mechanisms seem inadequate in dealing with this bottom-up
challenge.
At the same time, and secondly, the government has allowed the online video
market to be monopolized by only a few key players. With the exception of
independent LeTV, the largest television platforms are now all subsidiaries of Baidu
(iQiyi), Alibaba (Youku), and Tencent (Tencent Video), the ‘Internet Tigers’ in China
(BAT). These corporate giants have thus challenged the monopoly of state-controlled
television stations but have simultaneously divided the market among a few powerful

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players, a situation to which governance models are geared. Only the Shanghai Media
Group and the Hunan Broadcasting System have successfully launched their own
digital television platforms, respectively BesTV and MangoTV to compete with the
big internet companies (see chapter 3).
In addition, professional television production has increasingly been privatized
as a consequence of the ‘commissioning reform’ in 2009 (Sun 2011). Since then,
hundreds of small private production companies have emerged, while the major
television stations have increasingly spun off and privatized their content production
departments, following HSTV’s early example in the late 1990s (see chapter 3; Zhong
2010; Liu 2010; Zhang 2016). In short, both production and distribution systems
underwent revolutionary changes as a consequence of state reforms, digitization, and
platformization. The expanse and opening-up of alternative distribution platforms
have provided small production companies with alternative lifelines, disentangled
from the state conglomerates.
For television platforms, collaborating with professional content producers to
obtain premium copyright content has become critical to the business model based on
attracting users and advertisements (Zhao and Keane 2013). Unlike Netflix for
example, which only allows access to content with a subscription and does not feature
advertising, Chinese video platforms generally offer free access to content (with
advertising) with a possibility of obtaining premium access (no advertising and access
to exclusive content). Audiences have been reluctant to pay for subscriptions, thus
forcing companies to rely on advertising revenue. In mid-2016, iQiyi had 481 million
active users, but only 20 million were subscribed premium members (Frater 2016). In
addition, the cost of programming has skyrocketed as the platforms compete for
premium content and exclusive rights (Curtin and Li 2018). Another important
difference with its counterparts abroad, is that Chinese television platforms offer far
wider range of content (e.g. LeTV live streams English Premier League football
matches) as well as interactive features (such as comment boards and chatrooms).
Netflix’ interface appears simple and stark compared to the options and
functionalities that Chinese television platforms offer (which could just as well be
termed ‘chaotic’ compared to Netflix).

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 The government’s former monopoly over television has quickly slipped through
its hands to China’s Internet Tigers. At the same time, the internet in China has
generally been perceived as a more permissive arena in China because of the grey
areas surrounding regulations. While it would be a simplification to infer causality
between the big tech-takeover and internet freedom, they are simultaneous
developments, and it is pivotal to spell out the consequences for television’s
traditional role as a governmental instrument.
Outlandish Talks (奇葩说 [qi pa shuo] is an excellent case to observe and analyze
the changes and continuities of Chinese television in the digital age. Outlandish talks is
China’s most popular online talk show, first aired in November 2014 on iQiyi, and
currently in its fifth season (as of December 2018). Featuring funny sound effects and
trendy designs, Outlandish talks brings together diverse and often extravagant Chinese
(online) celebrities together in a debate competition on myriad contemporary social
and cultural topics. Debating topics for example include: ‘is it okay to check your
partner’s mobile phone,’ ‘is it a waste when highly educated women become
housewives,’ or ‘would you let your parents live in a retirement home’ (Koetse 2017).
The relevance of the issued at hand has made the show ravenously popular amongst
particularly the balinghou (八零后 [post-1980 generation]) and the jiulinghou (九零后
[post-1990 generation]).
Outlandish talks is also exemplary for the development in Chinese television that
I described above. It was one of the first products of iQiyi Pictures, set up in July 2014
by Baidu to produce original and exclusive content for iQiyi’s streaming service.
While the show can be watched for free, one first has to watch 75 seconds of
advertisements (or purchase premium access). Moreover, the show is full of product
placements; Chinese tech giant Xiaomi paid a staggering 140 million rmb (20 million
usd) to be the main sponsor in the fourth season, and its logo and products are
omnipresent in the show. While Xiaomi smartphones are propped up on the hosts’
desk, next to yoghurt cups from dairy giant Mengniu, hosts actively engage with
product placement as well, often poking fun at plugged products and the conventions
of advertising and censorship. In one example, host He Jiong finds a funny pretext to
plug Head & Shoulders shampoo, which then pops onscreen with a ‘boing’ sound,
after which the host remarks that using it is a way to find true love. A single frame

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might contain more than a dozen product placements and brand logos (Doland 2017).
Advertising and product placement are thus the price for free content on iQiyi,
contrary to Netflix’s subscriber-based model.
According to Chinese media, one reason why Outlandish talks is successful is that
young people are increasingly interested in improving their speech skills. Luo
Yueying argues on Rednet that Outlandish talks is part of a broader shift in the talk
show entertainment genre, catering towards a new group of online audiences who
want to see more educational and sophisticated entertainment. The growing interest
in speaking skills is also evident by the success of the books and podcasts that have
sprung from the show—mastering such skills is regarded as an asset for one’s status
and career (Luo 2017; Koetse 2017).
At the same time however, the show has seen some groundbreaking and
controversial moments since it first aired. Topics of discussion are often challenging
established norms, and include cheating in a relationship, acceptance of an open
marriage, and homosexuality. In one such moment, celebrity mentor Kevin Tsai spoke
openly about his coming out as homosexual as the first male celebrity in Taiwan in
2001 in an episode about ‘should homosexual marriage be legalized’ (OT S2, E6). In
an emotional and tearful conversation, Tsai explained how he wants more stars to
come out, but simultaneously advises them to stay in the closet because of societal
pressures: “the only thing I can do is prove to those worrying dads and mums that
we’re not monsters. We can live well here” (Straits Times 2015; OT S2 E6). In another
episode, transgender Internet celebrity Chao Xiaomi came on the show to talk about
how it is to be gender fluid in contemporary China. The show seems to intently raise
controversial issues while skirting the boundaries of censorship, and SAPPRFT
banned the episode about homosexual marriage without comment. News of the ban
spread quickly however, leading to a large amount of online commentary about the
topic (Ball State Daily 2015; Curtin and Li 2018).
In the years since its inception in the early 2010s, platform television has
generally been a more permissive arena than broadcast television in China. This
allowed the emergence of Outlandish talks, and other shows pushing the boundaries
of acceptability such as the gay-themed drama Guardians (镇魂 [zhenhun]). However,
in June 2018 Guardians was pulled from streaming platform Youku for ‘content

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adjustments.’ The drama is based on a novel, which is explicit about the protagonists’
homosexual interactions, but the screenwriters presented their relationship as a close
brotherhood band to avoid censorship (Zhang 2018). Its removal is a step in a larger
government campaign to remove undesirable content from video platforms on the
internet, of which homosexuality has been the most high-profile target.
On 22 June 2017, the China Netcasting Services Association (CNSA), a subsidiary
internet regulation body of SAPPRFT, issued new regulations for online audio-visual
materials, targeting life-streaming, user-generated content, and professional videos.
Life-streaming was suspended completely, because these sites allegedly did not
comply with ‘existing regulations’ and for ‘promoting negative comments’ (SAPPRFT
2017). One week later, this was followed by new regulations requiring a license to
upload audiovisual content, and the general requirement that all online content
should “adhere to the correct political directions, and strive to disseminate
contemporary Chinese values” (Xinhua 2017). Any programs that are not in line with
official regulations will purportedly be removed, including videos that are harmful to
China’s image, endanger “national unity and social stability,” or display “luxurious
lifestyles,” “obscene pornography,” “abnormal sexual behavior, such as incest,
homosexuality, sexual perversions, and other sexual violence” (Chen 2017; Wang
2017). In addition, celebrity gossip websites and social media accounts were closed,
all on grounds of inappropriate content. This sweeping crackdown especially targeted
online audiovisual entertainment content, in order to bring them in line with official
regulations (Li and Jourdan 2017). In June 2018, censorship was tightened further in
the light of upcoming events such as the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the
PRC in 2019 and especially focused on banning ‘subversive’ adaptations of historical
events. Creators are also advised to focus on the lives of normal people and avoid
issues of social order and the ‘national situation’ (Feng 2018). It also requires the
curation of all audiovisual content posted on the internet. While it remains to be seen
whether this is viable, it clearly fits within the campaign to bring the internet under
closer control of the authorities—and demonstrates how the authorities are still
reactionary in their way of dealing with new developments.
The reactionary governmental reaction to digitization and platformization, as
well as the proliferation of user-generated audiovisual content could be

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conceptualized as a ‘broadcastization’ of the internet (Negro 2017; Franceschini 2018).
The (1) conglomeration of the market dominated by a small number of powerful
players, first in broadcast television, starting in the early 2000s and culminating in the
formation of the China Media Group in March 2018, and secondly in online television,
by the BAT-controlled platforms and (2) the increasing restrictions and regulations of
other audiovisual content and platforms by the Cyberspace Administration of China,
formed in 2017, have the potential effect of reducing the plurality of voices, re-
establishing the dominance of the state. At the same time, this assessment is premature,
as the Chinese internet is very vibrant: while BAT dominates the scene, new players
emerge regularly, and innovative content can become popular in an instant. Yet the
same dualistic logic that drives the operation of television stations and Internet
platforms undergirds Chinese government policy: on the one hand, maintaining
ideological control, while on the other hand, allowing the development of successful
internet companies that could be used to exert China’s new cultural power abroad
(Keane and Fung 2018; Keane and Wu 2018).

2.6 Conclusion

The very concept of television in China has come a long way since its inception in the
late 1950s. While television started off as yet another technical instrument to reach the
population with ideological and propagandistic messages, it became a symbol for
modernization during the Deng-era starting in the late 1970s. On the one hand, the
CCP promoted television as an instrument of modernization and for maintaining
political control; on the other hand, grassroots demands for interesting and
entertaining content and the introduction of limited commercialization through
advertising established television as a site for conflicting political and social forces
(Lull 1991). River Elegy best illustrates this political climate in the late 1980s. It also
epitomized the status of television as a platform for high culture within the context of
the dominant mode of governance at the time: making China better, ensuring its
prosperity, and improving the ‘quality’ (suzhi) of the population. The population was
brought within the orbit of state management, and state leaders envisioned an

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important role for television in instilling the ‘correct’ morals and values in the
population. The 1989 Tiananmen Incident marked a watershed moment as the CCP
reaffirmed firm ideological control over television, while simultaneously increasing
the pace of marketization in the wake of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc.
In the 1990s, Yearnings symbolized a reconfiguration of the relation between the
state, television, and the personal: people seized upon the ambiguities and
ambivalences within the story to challenge the potential hegemony within this text. In
addition, non-state funding through advertising and business sponsoring became the
primary business model in Chinese television, while entertainment television became
mainstream fare. In the early 2000s, marketization reforms reached their full extent,
leading to the formation of large industrial conglomerates dominating the entire chain
of television production and distribution. Here, the latent incoherence ingrained in
the dualistic logic between political and commercial imperatives has come clearly to
the fore. The flood of reality-based entertainment programs led to a governmental
backlash in the 2000s, amidst worries about the vulgarization of society. The discourse
of maintaining harmony and stability gave a clear orientation to regulatory practices,
leading to a situation where on the one hand, marketization processes continued in
the media landscape, while on the other hand regulatory control actually intensified
(Brady 2009, 106–9; Zhao 2008). The ‘purify entertainment’ campaign can therefore
clearly be seen as a reaction to the perception that television has turned into a theater
of vulgarity, contradicting CCP views on television as an ideological and cultural
instrument.
The distinct dualistic logic has come about as a direct consequence of the
marketization reforms in the Chinese television industry: (1) policy making and
regulation has been driven by political and economic incentives; (2) this ambiguous
logic of political conformity as well as commercial imperatives has been amplified by
provincial TV stations such as HSTV; (3) the rise of provincial stations posed a
challenge to CCTV, which was ideologically closer to the CCP; (4) the entrance of
private capital in the production of reality-based television (through advertising and
product placement) is beneficial for both TV stations and private investors; (5)
tensions are thus both economic (competition between stations) and ideological (good
values vs. attracting eyeballs); (6) SAPPRFT has functioned as a reactionary

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instrument without tackling the structural formation that underlies the emergence of
these symptoms in the first place. While the entrance of digital media and television
platforms has revolutionized television distribution and consumption, the dualistic
logic and reactionary policy characterizing the playing field are similar to legacy
television. The breach of the state monopoly by the BAT companies does not seem to
have significantly altered or exacerbated the inherent structural ambiguities, although
more research in this direction is needed. Simultaneously, the emergence of successful
national internet champions is in the interest of the government, as they provide a
possible counterweight against the daunting global influence of GAFAM (Google,
Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft—the American tech giants.
This chapter has sought to establish how television developed historically as a
governmental instrument, to explicate the dualistic logic undergirding television
making in China, and to explore the consequences of digitization and platformization
for the Chinese television industry—providing the historical and political-economic
context for subsequent chapters. At the same time, the focus in this chapter has been
rather top-down, looking at economic and political developments rather than how
television making works on the production floor.
The next two chapters nuance and complicate these assessments from a more
bottom-up perspective, in order to provide a more complete picture of how
governance through television works: after all, while policy makers may set the
boundaries and contours of acceptability, it is the television makers who interpret,
engage, push, and circumvent these boundaries. But before turning to the makers
themselves in chapter 4, I first turn to another intermediate which sets and delimits
the framework in which television making takes place: the organization of HSTV itself.
How does it approach and govern its personnel? The concept of creativity here forms
an interesting line of investigation: HSTV self-ascribes itself as ‘creative,’ while almost
all television makers employed a similar discourse. By examining how this concept
functions within the organization, as well as for television makers in their daily work,
I show how discourses of creativity influence the framework in which television-
making takes place, while television makers simultaneously employ the concept to
describe the merits of their own work, even though they sometimes also subvert these
dominant discourses.

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