01. Conditional Survival
Entertainment Under Watch
Hi there. Welcome to Active Faults.
I’ve talked about faults and rifts in the last issue. Today, I want to lay out some context for our future deep dives into fanquan (Click and find my work-in-progress Chinese fandom glossary!)
Let’s get it out of the way and point out the elephant in the room first: Chinese entertainment is somewhat state-controlled. No surprises there. What’s more nuanced is the mode of control adopted by the state, which I call conditional survival.
What do I mean by that? Put simply, Chinese entertainment exists in a perpetual tug-of-war.
The state needs the entertainment industry to thrive. It can be used as a politicized mouthpiece to spread party ideology, and a powerful proxy exploited by the government to strengthen its rule.
On the other hand, the state also needs to keep entertainment in check. At moments when it is disobedient or of no use, the state will suppress its existence.
It can survive and sometimes it must, but only on the government’s terms.
Party Megaphone
Chinese entertainment is politicised in two ways: the embedding of the state into some content and its interferences over everything else. You’ve probably heard of these blockbusters——Wolf Warrior (and it even has a sequel), The Battle at Lake Changjin (lead actor being the Wolf Warrior guy, again), My People My Country——all of them party propaganda repackaged into epic, blood-boiling war scenes with A-listers as cameos. Young and beautiful idols are deliberately cast to attract their young fans to enter the cinema and soak it all up.
These “main-melody” (主旋律) films are made so that the dominant political ideology can be instilled. Before that, anti-Japan period dramas were where those kinds of content festered. TV series that revolves around the Sino-Japanese war never left our peripherals in the last two decades. They are full of stock characters like the vicious, puny Japanese commander and courageous Chinese soldier all for people’s liberation.
What’s noteworthy is how the “main-melody” has become one of the only audible sounds in recent years. Guess why Lake Changjin was the highest-grossing film in 2021? Because Chinese civil servants were passive-aggressively forced to watch it and tickets were on their employers. I wish I am kidding.
Others feel equally compelled to watch these movies because no alternatives are available. State censorship has silenced most artistic expression. One of the highest-rated Chinese films last year, Return to Dust, depicts rural hardships and the lives of people with disabilities. The director had to insinuate the protagonist’s eventual suicide using a shot of a barely noticeable pesticide bottle as the credits roll in, but slap on subtitles that read “they lived happily ever after”. Because of course poverty, suicide and disability aren’t a part of the main melody (sorry for the spoilers). This film was then abruptly censored online and taken out of cinemas after the public caught on. It failed to meet the conditions, so it couldn’t survive. As one Weibo post reads, Return to Dust reaches its perfect ending as it returns to dust itself.
Filmmakers are cornered to make wolf warrior sagas, then, not because they earn critical acclaim but because they are safe. Meanwhile, international films have basically vanished in theatres and filmgoers are left with no choice but to embrace domestic productions. Here’s the two-pronged politicization I talked about: embedding and interfering that mutually reinforce each other.
Time Out
The exploitation of entertainment as the party mouthpiece goes hand in hand with explicit suspension and intrusion. Upon ex-leader Jiang Zemin’s death, the Chinese internet went monochrome for more than a week in his memorial. User interfaces of most social networking, leisure and entertainment applications like Weibo, Douyin, Taobao and Xiao Hong Shu were rendered colourless to pay respect.
Likewise, many fandoms have voluntarily adopted an “entertainment ban” in response to Jiang’s death.
Even though the ban itself is not new, the increased frequency is. More and more we see fans telling each other to shut up not just after unexpected political events, but around sensitive times in general (June 4th or party member reshuffling season, for example) to avoid controversy. Suspending private enjoyment for national interests is a new way to assert authority and keep entertainment in check - “I can call it quits just like that and you’ll have to obey without me even asking for it”. Power is consolidated furthermore when UIs changed back on cue after Jiang’s funeral ended. The state determines how and when people should be politically involved - endure, play by the conditions and no harm, no foul.
And sometimes silence is not enough either. One critical task for Chinese celebrities nowadays is to repost the right content at the right time. This includes national memorials, like Sino-Japanese War and Nanjing Massacre as well as dates with party significance. State media like People’s Daily or Xinhua News would draft a template post featuring a nationalistic one-liner, and celebrities would have to follow suit by reposting. Failure to do that will be called out by the public and the celebrity will be cancelled. Fans collude with this policing and police themselves in conjunction, because they want to ensure their idol is “within lines” and their behaviour wouldn’t besmirch the idol by association.
The bans are concurrent with a heightened scrutinisation of celebrity behaviours and, subsequently, the mechanisation of celebrities into a bunch of sponsored ad-posting, morally impeccable and patriotic teacher’s pets who are devoid of any kind of opinions. It became their job to spread “positive energy” (正能量) or, in other words, state-loving energy and be “politically correct”. It’s either this or be less than perfect and embrace the career death that ensues. Any kind of scandal or rumour can ruin them - you might have heard of Zhang Zhehan, his sudden and astounding fame overthrown by pictures of him near a Japanese shrine commemorating the war dead. He is still in a cyber exile: his accounts are blocked on Chinese social media sites everywhere.
At this point, Chinese entertainment is practically hollowed out and taxidermied into stand-ins for the party. And that entails something very important: the actual party can be concealed behind it. Its omnipresence disappears into life.
Firefighters
Last November, a deadly fire broke out in Xinjiang’s Urumqi. Deceased residents were trapped inside their homes because their building entrance was blockaded due to COVID restrictions. The unprecedented internet outrage eventually led to the White Paper Protests, the largest civil unrest I’ve seen since Xi’s takeover and probably even Tiananmen. As the anger simmered, the result of Kris Wu’s court ruling was suddenly released after a long delay. Once an influential idol with over 60 million followers, he was sentenced to 13 years of jail for rape.
Many flocked to condemn the star, but others suspected the curious timing. 398 media outlets covered Kris Wu and the news attracted over 2100 million views on Weibo, while Urumqi was largely censored from the headlines. CCTV News created the official hashtag and wrote 3 Weibo posts about Wu. Many Weibo users wrote that obviously Wu “took the bullet” and was headlined to cover up Xinjiang. Others encouraged everyone to look to Xinjiang and demand a government response. New media accounts and bloggers had to entitle their Urumqi coverage “Latest Updates of Kris Wu’s case” for it to pass the censor and be posted.
This is not the first time that “Firefighter Wu” saved the day. Authorities attempted to quell the outrage caused by an extremely brutal assault incident in Tangshan, by releasing the announcement of Wu’s first court hearing in June 2022.
This is exactly why the state needs entertainment to thrive because it can also be used as a distraction and anaesthetic. Tabloid gossip is sometimes brought forward and amplified on purpose to divert public attention away from social issues and political failures.
Shouzhi Xia’s interesting paper on Chinese entertainment reveals that the more audience is interested in entertainment media, the more likely they are to accept the indoctrination of the state. Of course, Wolf Warriors and the likes of it played a part in this, but as Xia argues, “enduring entertainment exposure” itself makes people more vulnerable to propaganda. It can “widen the masses’ political knowledge gap”, weakens their abilities to make judgements and reduce their motivation for civic engagement. Another paper confirms that entertainment-oriented content on social media can have distraction effects and reduces the likelihood of high-effort political participation. In the long run, Xia also argues that indulgence in entertainment undermines the public’s perception of reality.
This could be what the state intends as it manoeuvres the entertainment industry: to ensure that we are amusing ourselves to loyalty, and then an oblivious death.
But I don’t believe they’ve won yet. It’s clear not everyone lacks social awareness and fell for the timed stunt. Not everyone became passive recipients of party propaganda.
There are people who hate the main melody, the monochrome UIs, all the lanpian (烂片 n. shitty films. A useful word to know) and the monotonic celebrities. Hate the distractions from important news and manipulations of truths. And there are people who gained consciousness before leading digital activism within the entertainment context.
That will be the focus of the next issue of Active Faults. I’ll see you then.
Happy early CNY! 🐰
e
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