How TV stole Spring Festival

Gala still commands attention from a wide section of CHinese viewers

Over the past 30 years or so, China Central Television says its Spring Festival gala has drawn the most viewers of any show broadcast at home or abroad on Chinese New Year's Eve.

The gala also has a reputation for catapulting unknown performers from obscurity to superstardom overnight. Before the 1987 show, Taiwan-born singer Kris Phillips (费翔 Fèixiáng) was a nobody, his unsold albums lining the back shelves of record stores across the country. Yet his rendition of A Torch of Fire in Winter (《冬天里的一把火》Dōngtiān lǐ de yī bǎ huǒ) that year instantly transformed him into a household name. The song's chorus, "You're just like a torch of fire in winter, whose flames warm my heart" (你就像那冬天里的一把火，熊熊火光温暖了我 Nǐ jiù xiàng nà dōngtiān lǐ de yī bǎ huǒ, xióngxióng huǒguāng wēnnuǎnle wǒ) caught the public's imagination and led to Phillips' album selling 1.6 million copies.

Stories about Phillips and others inspired a train of wannabe stars to journey to Beijing to win a place on the show. Zhao Benshan (赵本山), renowned as the King of Skit, has been a gala fixture for about 20 years. The Dongbei native and his dark blue Maoist-era suit (中山装 Zhōngshānzhuāng) instantly won over the national audience with skits taking off rural customs and speech. His punchlines became public catchphrases overnight.

Yang Xue, 26, from Jilin province, recalls that her family used to eat dumplings around midnight on New Year's Eve in keeping with tradition. They have even polished off the dumplings ahead of time to ensure they are ready for Zhao's skit, which usually takes place just before the bell tolls for midnight.

Yang's family is by no means unique in having traditions altered by the gala. Zhu, a Shanghai native in his 50s, recalls that his pre-TV New Year's Eve ritual involved offering sacrifices to his ancestors and performing a kowtow ceremony, before gathering the whole family for a reunion dinner.

Yet even Zhu feels some nostalgia for the days when neighbors would watch the gala together on a black and white TV. "There were few TV channels and programs in the 1980s. The gala was a once-in-a-year opportunity for us to see a whole range of stars all at the same time."

However, things changed. While the gala focuses on light pop culture, a show rarely unfolds without at least a passing nod toward important political and social events. For example, in 2009, the directors were faced with a particularly sticky conundrum, as the previous year had proved a momentous one in good ways and bad, encompassing the tragic Sichuan earthquake, the Beijing Olympic Games, the successful launch of the Shenzhou 7 manned space mission and the onset of the global financial crisis. This provided rich source material and the show featured appearances from astronauts, Olympic champions and "Cola Boy," who became famous by asking for a cold bottle of Coke the moment he was rescued after being buried in debris for 80 hours following the Wenchuan quake.

That year's show drew sharp criticism for leaning too heavily toward a political agenda. The complaints painted a continuing argument over the true popularity of the gala, especially with younger generations. A well-known joke illustrates the debate: a Chinese man in search of a wife registers an account on a matchmaker website. One day, he is surprised to find that all the women who have shown interest have deleted him from their friend lists. He finds out that someone has logged into his account and changed his hobbies to include "watching the CCTV Spring Festival gala".

Xiao Shufeng, a woman in her 30s from Shandong province, says the gala is boring.

"Every year it's the same old faces," she says. "The skits are stale and superficial, always following an inflexible model of trying to be amusing while sprinkling in sentimental elements. I felt like I was watching CCTV News instead of an entertainment program."

Even the gala's creator, Huang Yihe, has conceded that the proliferation of Chinese entertainment shows has chipped away at the gala's appeal, with many younger viewers having more fun criticizing it online than watching it on TV.

Conversely, overseas Chinese represent an increasingly loyal audience. For Guan, who emigrated from China to Philadelphia, the show's appeal lies in its evocation of his old hometown, family and traditional Spring Festival celebrations. "It doesn't matter whether the gala itself is engaging," Guan says. "What matters is that the whole family sits around the dinner table and enjoys the rare occasion of a reunion with the TV on."

Many viewers, loyal aficionados or otherwise, will pass the time in the run-up to gala night by guessing which stars will appear, while the director does his or her level best to keep the content of the show under wraps. However, in 2011 the show was groundbreaking in that three of the slots were made public in advance. These were filled by the three finalists of the reality TV show I Want to Perform in the Spring Gala (《我要上春晚》Wǒ yào shàng chūnwǎn), which follows grassroots artists as they compete to appear in the gala.

After just one full year on air, the reality show already threatens to eclipse the gala's popularity. Winners of the TV shows, including a street performance duo, a singer plucked from the underpasses of Beijing and a group of street-dancing migrant workers from Shenzhen, were by far the most popular of the debut acts.

Yet despite peoples' preference for the reality show over its esteemed predecessor, the two enjoy a symbiotic relationship, one that organizers hope will for the time being deflect attention away from the gala's perceived shortcomings.

Courtesy of The World of Chinese, www.theworldofchinese.com

The World of Chinese