MOIRA WEIGEL - My Life and Times in Chinese TV
The tower housing the Shanghai Media Group looks like the future pictured in an old movie. The front of the building curves inward, slightly, between frames that peak in enormous antennae. Pollution has grayed its white aluminum cladding. But at the top of twenty-six stories the turquoise logo of the group shines.
The grounds where it stands, on Nanjing West Road, once lay at the edge of the Shanghai International Settlement, the port on the Huangpu River that British generals forced the Qing emperor to hand over in the treaty that ended the first Opium War. A real estate magnate named Silas Hardoon first developed this property in 1903, as part of a twenty-six acre fantasy estate. Born penniless in the Jewish slums of Baghdad, Hardoon came to Shanghai via Bombay, and died the richest man in Asia. His gardens were based on a sketch that a Buddhist monk had drawn of paradise.
My contact had given me instructions in painstaking English. I was to present myself at the SMG gate at ten. Someone from HR would meet me and take me up to the sixteenth floor to sort out paperwork. I was not to forget my passport or the three hundred yuan (about fifty dollars) that I would need to leave as a deposit for my ID.
It started to drizzle as I tramped from the subway to the wrong entrance. When I tried to shortcut across the parking lot and a man in a suit shouted at me “You’re in China!” (meaning, follow rules), I hardly flinched. I was too busy practicing the two sentences that I had prepared to say to the Communist Party official who has invited me to spend this month inside one of the biggest companies run by the Chinese propaganda department. Mr Feng I of truth am too happy to meet you! Thank you for giving me that good chance to penetrate your so excellent company!
Out back, at the proper entrance, an HR employee in a thin pink poncho was waiting for me, frowning through the rain. Introducing herself as Sunny, she led me past the babyfaced army guards, then held me back to let a pack of soldiers running laps around the parking lot grunt past. By the time I was through security and on the sixteenth floor standing still for her colleague to take my picture, the back of my carefully starched blouse was Rorschached with sweat. Sweat had curdled the vanilla body lotion on my sternum.
Sunny Xeroxed my passport and student visa and gave me a document to sign, promising in both Mandarin and English “not to do anything against the Communist Party” for the duration of my stay. Then she showed me to where I would sit. While she went to find me one of the bottles of SMG branded water that stood on each of the empty desks around me, I looked around. This was where the propagandists worked. For the next four weeks I would be one of them, but at 10.30 AM on Monday, the newsroom was deserted. So much the better. I had promised not to do anything against the Party, but my plan for the next four weeks was to be as diligent a double agent as possible. I was going to learn how rising China spins its story to itself.
After winning the Civil War, in 1949, one of the first tasks Mao Zedong set upon was to build a propaganda system. Headed by a member of the Politburo, with Propaganda and Thought Work Leading Groups at the central, provincial, city, and district levels, the supra-bureaucracy he created controlled the political department of the People’s Liberation Army, state-run sectors like culture, technology, and media, and mass organizations, like the Journalists Association. It also placed cadres in every other state agency. This spy network acted as the ermu houshe—“ears, eyes, and tongue”—of the Party, delivering directives and reporting on anyone who failed to comply with them.
Television was not very important during the Mao era. The first national TV broadcast only took place ten years after the founding of the PRC, on May Day, 1958. Beijing Television, the precursor to China Central Television launched on September 2 of that year. (CCTV has remained the most powerful broadcaster in China; today, it has forty-five channels and reaches over 1 billion viewers.) The first regional station, Shanghai TV, followed in October, with Liaoning, Zhejiang, and Guangdong provinces close behind. Only 26,000 TV sets were manufactured between 1958 and 1965, and most were placed in public settings, where people gathered to watch broadcasts resembling illustrated lectures that aired for several hours, several days per week.
Starting at 7 PM, after a long, static shot of Mao’s portrait with the de facto national anthem, “The East is Red,” playing in the background, Beijing TV viewers would see a talking head praising Party heroes, and reporting on visits from foreign dignitaries or the struggle of the North Vietnamese against American imperialists, occasionally cutting to official footage. Sometimes a movie about the War of Resistance against the Japanese or the Communist triumph over Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army followed.
This pattern might have continued indefinitely. But economic collapse after the failure of the Great Leap Forward stalled the development of broadcasting infrastructure, and during the Cultural Revolution many stations shut down altogether. The ones that remained became less ambitious with their programming. A British journalist who visited China in 1970 recalled that Beijing TV’s evening news show devoted eighteen of its twenty-six minutes to scrolling quotations from Mao. By 1978 fewer than ten million Chinese had access to a television. The economic opening and reform that began that year would change this. ..
See also
Chinese Journalists resist censorship: Timothy Garton Ash on The Southern Weekly affair
Looking Back at the June 4 Massacre, Twenty-Four Years on
The Crises of Party Culture: by Yang Guang
The crises of Party culture become clear with a single glance. The CPC is called the ruling party, yet it operates according to secret party rules: this is an identity crisis. Its formal ceremonies and slogans are like those of an extremist church, and it has long lost its utopian doctrine that stirred the passion of the people: this is an ideological crisis. It tells beautiful lies while accepting bribes and keeping mistresses: this is a moral crisis. The totalitarian system is in the process of collapsing, yet political reform is not in the foreseeable future: this is a political crisis. It has corrupted traditional values and also rejected universal values, rendering Party members and government officials at a spiritual loss: this is a crisis of values.
Looking Back at the June 4 Massacre, Twenty-Four Years on
The Crises of Party Culture: by Yang Guang
The crises of Party culture become clear with a single glance. The CPC is called the ruling party, yet it operates according to secret party rules: this is an identity crisis. Its formal ceremonies and slogans are like those of an extremist church, and it has long lost its utopian doctrine that stirred the passion of the people: this is an ideological crisis. It tells beautiful lies while accepting bribes and keeping mistresses: this is a moral crisis. The totalitarian system is in the process of collapsing, yet political reform is not in the foreseeable future: this is a political crisis. It has corrupted traditional values and also rejected universal values, rendering Party members and government officials at a spiritual loss: this is a crisis of values.
Blind Activist Calls For End To 'Lawlessness' In China
China: Writing out the non-Han
China - The old regime and the revolution
My first visit to Gandhiji: Tan Yun-Shan (including Gandhi's first letter to China)
Closing the Circle: Article on Revolution
