The Evolution of the New Year's Gala Concert in Chinese Media

Chzhu Bokun PhD in Philosophy Postgraduate student, Department of Theory and History of Journalism, Peoples' Friendship University of Russia 121467, Russia, Moscow, Moldavskaya str., 2k1 zhubokun123@gmail.com

The last "New Year's Gala Concert" ^[8] ("Chunwan"; ; sokr. The Gala concert), broadcast by the Central Television of China (CCTV; on January 31, 2022, once again set a record for the number of viewers - 1.296 billion people (+22.01% compared to the broadcast of 2021). Behind the main telecast of the Spring Festival ("Chunze"; ) at the same time, more than 650 media outlets were monitored in 170 countries around the world (9).

For the Chinese, watching a gala concert at a festive table on the eve of the Lunar New Year, as the Spring Festival is also called, has become a full-fledged tradition on which more than one generation has grown up. To satisfy such a huge and heterogeneous audience, the directors of the Gala Concert include traditional musical, dance and literary performances, sketch shows, humorous performances in the genre of "xiangsheng" (; built on a dialogue between two artists filled with puns and allusions), theatrical sketches, acrobatic shows, etc. Moreover, in the choice of numbers, artists and songs, the organizers of the Gala concert rely on the requests of the audience, which makes each issue a unique media event and the main cultural holiday of modern China.

Along with the rapid reforms that have taken place in Chinese society over the past 40 years, the preferences of the Gala concert audience have also changed rapidly. We must not forget about the strong influence of the CCP and the censors through whom every issue of this grandiose TV program passed. Watching the releases of the Gala Concerts, you can find characteristic changes in individual issues and categories of the program, indicating the large-scale transformations that took place in Chinese television, society and culture as a whole. In this article, we have identified several key stages through which the evolution of the Gala Concert took place on the way to becoming a nationwide media ritual:

1) the "cultural thaw" and the penetration of the Taiwanese and Hong Kong waves;

2) commercialization of Chinese television;

3) mass involvement of viewers in the production of the TV show.

When analyzing the topic we chose, we primarily relied on the work of Chinese television researchers and specialists in the history of the Gala Concert - Chen Yin (?)), Hu Zheng–rong (), Li Yu (), etc. The diaries of the director of the first Gala concerts, Huang Yi-he, turned out to be extremely useful in preparing the article. In addition, in order to fully understand the historical context in which the Gala Concert was broadcast, we turned to the works of Chinese historians and cultural scientists - Xiao Dong–lian ()), Dai Jin-hua (), Ma Li-cheng (), Lin Zhi-jun ().

Taiwan WaveThe cultural and media life of the PRC in the early 1980s can be characterized as ambiguous and contradictory.

On the one hand, after the curtailment of the "cultural revolution" (Wenhua gemin; 1966-1976) and the beginning of the "policy of reform and openness" (gaige kaifang; 1978), a kind of "thaw" occurs in all spheres of Chinese society: censorship is noticeably weakening, reviving national television, film production is resumed. On the other hand, in 1983, the CPC briefly returned to the rhetoric of prohibitions and restrictions, but the Gala Concert that started that year miraculously managed to avoid new cultural persecution.

These contradictions of the new era in relation to the Chinese nomenclature to the musical hits of the Taiwanese wave, which spread in the PRC in the late 1970s - the first half of the 1980s, are especially indicative. Official propaganda branded the work of Taiwanese performers with "decadent music" ("mimi zhi yin"; ), however, cassettes with their songs were still smuggled into to mainland China, and some Chinese enthusiasts even managed to catch "enemy waves" on the radio (Xiao Dong-lian, 2008, 440-441 p.). The face of the Taiwanese wave gradually covering the PRC was Teresa Teng (1953 – 1995) [Hu Zheng-rong, 2010, 218 p.], the style of which many Chinese musicians tried to imitate – one of them was Li Gui-yi (, 1944) with his song "Native Love" ("Xiang lian"; ), which sounded in the film "The Legend of the Three Gorges" ("Sanxia Chuansho";, ?), which was broadcast in prime time-time CCTV in 1979 The composition used electric guitars and drums atypical for Chinese pop, reminiscent of the Taiwanese wave, which made "Native Love" the first pop song in China. Soon censors banned the song that leaked onto wide screens for its "bourgeois and extravagant sound" (Ma Li-cheng, Lin Zhi-jun, 1998, 123-124 p.), despite its huge popularity, and it began to be illegally distributed among ordinary Chinese along with compositions of the Taiwanese wave. It is noteworthy that the ban on "Native Love" did not lead to public censure of Li Gui-yi. On the contrary, she received thousands of letters in which representatives of the stage and ordinary people expressed sympathy and support for her (Li Yu, Deng Jia-rong, 1980, 8 p.) – this strikingly distinguished the general atmosphere of 1979 from the period of the "cultural revolution".

In 1983, "Native Love" unexpectedly acquired a second media life, getting into the program of the first ever New Year's Gala concert. The famous Chinese musician and the main director of the first Gala concert, Huang Yi-he ( 19; 1934 - 2019), developing the concept of this television holiday, decided to conduct a survey among ordinary viewers through the hotline and find out what songs and productions they want to see in the telecast. To understand the scale: in 1982, there were 27.6 million televisions (10) and 3 million phone owners (11) in China. It follows from Huang Yi-he's diaries that a huge number of Chinese people wanted to hear "Native Love" on the air of the Gala concert, but the censors did not give the go-ahead. Only after the director showed a large stack of notebooks filled with the names, addresses and phone numbers of the audience, who asked to include Lee Gui-yi's hit in the program, the party members agreed (Huang Yi-he, Chen Fan, 2008, 37 p.). In other words, at that moment the CCP gave up under the weight of public opinion realizing the mass recognition of "Native love", despite all the prohibitions and restrictions. Later, Huang Yi-he, commenting on the birth of the Gala concert, admitted that "it was then that the whole country reached a consensus on the real cessation of the cultural revolution" (Chen Yin, 2018, 45 p.).

However, a few months after the Spring Festival of 1983, Chinese censors tried to strengthen their propaganda grip again by launching a nationwide campaign to eradicate spiritual pollution ("Qingchu Jingsheng uzhan yundong"; ). There are several wild cases of harassment within the framework of this campaign: for example, photos of young children naked were classified as "obscene"; servicemen were forbidden to take photos of wives and girls with them, as this was considered a sign of "vulgarity"; in some cities women were forbidden to enter state institutions with their hair down (12). Having not decided which "spiritual dirt" to fight, by the end of 1983 the campaign was hastily curtailed, and fortunately, it did not affect the second broadcast of the Gala concert in any way, but only indicated the ineffectiveness of the prohibition policy in the new decade.

At the same time, the second Gala Concert turned out to be no less daring than the first. At the beginning of 1984, the PRC agreed with the UK to return Hong Kong in 1997 . For China and the whole world, this news became a sensation, and Huang Yi-he, who also directed the second Gala concert, decided to take advantage of it. After listening to dozens of cassettes with musical hits from Hong Kong and Taiwan, he managed to find and invite Hong Kong performers Zhang Ming-min (;; 1956) and Xi Xiu-lan (; 1950), as well as Taiwanese TV presenter Huang A-yuan (; 1956) to take part in the show. and the Taiwanese in the Gala concert symbolized the unification of the country, possible despite political and ideological differences. And the Gala concert itself secured the status of the boldest and loudest cultural and media event in China (Dai Jin-hua, 2018, 32 p.).

The illusion of choiceIn the 90s, the Gala Concert gradually turned from a daring, largely youth media event into a popular media ritual for the masses.

Newly invited to the role of the main director, Huang Yi-he, during the opening of the concert in 1990, said that the Spring Festival is "modeling dumplings, launching firecrackers and watching a Gala concert." This trinity marked the end of the experiments of the turbulent 80s and the formation of a completely different concept against the background of rapid economic growth in China. TV has managed to take a central place in the social life of the Chinese, and the Gala concert has become truly the main "dish". However, not only ordinary viewers showed an appetite for it, but advertisers, whose market swelled along with the general growth of the nation's welfare, and the struggle of these two groups became a landmark for Chinese media.

In 1992, CCTV established the annual popular vote "My favorite program of the Gala Concert" ("Wo zui siaide chunwan jemu"; ) among viewers. The voting included such nominations as "song", "dance", "theatrical sketch", "comedy", etc. The votes of the audience were collected by the CCTV-owned newspaper "Chinese Telenovosti" ("Zhongguo dianshi bao", and for the first time 240 thousand Chinese made their choice through it (13).

Initially, it was assumed that such a nomination would continue the tradition of the first Gala concerts, formed under the direct influence of the audience, and create a sense of belonging to the holiday in society. But then large corporations began to interfere in the voting, having their own view on who deserves to win. They were driven by commercial interest: the winners of the nominations in "My Favorite Gala Concert Program" attracted huge public attention, and advertising with them brought companies big profits. In order to achieve the victory of their candidate, with whom the company has already signed an advertising contract (and who agreed in principle to participate in advertising – then companies were often refused by many performers), they manipulated the voting results by any means. The Chunlan Group of Companies () intervened particularly actively in the voting, which even achieved the establishment of a separate nomination "Chunlan Cup" ("Chunlan Bay"; ) in a Gala concert in 1996. Subsequently, the same people began to receive awards from year to year: comedians Zhao Ben-shan (; 1957) and Feng Gong (; 1957), singers Sui Zu-ying (; 1966), Cai Ming (; 1961), etc. Random persons almost never received hail, even despite the obvious sympathy of the public. All this began to cause discontent among viewers, especially with the advent of the Internet, where everyone had the opportunity to challenge the voting results (14). As a result, celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Gala Concert, in 2013, the management of CCTV decided to abandon the system of awards for the best performances, compromising with the audience losing faith in them. Thus ended the 20-year era of wild commercialization of Chinese television.

The voice of migrant workers

The Chinese leadership put an end to the dominance of the irremovable stage and profit-hungry advertisers in the main television holiday of the People's Republic of China, which once hindered the development of the Gala Concert with its censorship. Back in 2004, while the audience was fighting with advertisers, the Main State Administration for Press, Radio, Film and Television ("Guojia xinwen chuban guangdian zongju"; the notification on the choice of programs for the Gala concert was issued, thereby indicating a course to support popular culture (14).

After the publication of the notification, CCTV launches the talent show "Alley of Stars" ("Singuan Dadao"), which gathers talented performers from all over the country. The winners of the show took part in a Gala concert. Thanks to the "Alley of Stars", such ordinary people from the people as Li Yu-gang (1978), Yang-wei Lin-hua (1980), Tseng Ying (1973) and others get on the big screens. Soon, a number of other talent shows appear on CCTV, such as "Super Girls" ("Chaoji Nyusheng"; ), "Funny Male Voices" ("Kuaile Nansheng"; ), "I want to go to a Gala Concert" ("Wo yao shan chunwan"; ), in which also non-media performers who get a chance to get into the main TV program of the People's Republic of China participate.

A landmark was the performance of the migrant worker Wang Bao-qiang (1982) at the 2008 Gala Concert, where he, along with other representatives of the working people, performed the "Song of the Migrant Worker" ("Nungmingong zhi ge"; ). This speech demonstrated the existence of the problem of low-income migrant workers moving to dangerous and low-paid part-time jobs from villages to large megacities (in 2020 there were 285.6 million labor migrants in China ^[16]), and at the same time the central government's understanding of this problem, the absence of attempts to hide it from the information field.

An unusual way to convey the folk spirit of the holiday can be found in the CCTV broadcast an hour before the start of the 2015 Gala concert, when the audience gathered at the table were shown preparations for the holiday, interviewed presenters and passers-by. A week before the Lunar Holiday, the TV channel installed special "wish booths" all over China, where anyone could go to congratulate their relatives and friends on camera. The selected videos were broadcast just at this preparatory hour. In them, we see sincere, real emotions of ordinary Chinese: a schoolboy apologizes to his parents for all the mistakes he made in the outgoing year; a student who failed to return to his relatives for a holiday sends them congratulations; a girl who has not seen her mother for a long time promises to return home. We see real people who are embarrassed to speak on camera, do not hold back tears and share their experiences (17).

 Such a massive penetration of ordinary Chinese into the Gala concert program is a rare example of the direct influence of viewers on the formation of the appearance of the TV program, through which they conduct a dialogue with the state, telling about their aspirations and problems. The whole history of the evolution of the Gala Concert is imbued with this sometimes difficult, but incessant interaction between Chinese society and Chinese authorities, mediated by Chinese television. At the stage of its formation, the Gala concert shouts to the party leadership about the need to revive the life of the country after the persecution of the "cultural revolution". In the 90s and early 00s, the Gala concert was commercialized and gradually lost its main value - the connection with the audience. And since the second half of the 00s, the government has already returned to the Gala Concert its main function - dialogue with society.