Event
For more than 30 years, the annual variety show on Chinese Central Television (CCTV) called Spring Festival Gala (Chunwan) has been a state-sponsored enactment of the Chinese nation. For its 2014 installment, some major “innovations” were promised, including its alleged official desination as a “national project” comparable in status to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Analyzing the texts and paratexts of the galas in sample years, this paper demonstrates some key discursive features of this show. Beamed globally via the satellite and Internet, the gala creates a trans-territorial enactment of festivity that all those of the Chinese origin around the world participate in. By invoking the vernacular notions of ancestors, blood ties, family relations, and home, and by iconizing widely familiar physical objects into symbols of the Chinese nation, the gala essentializes not only the Chinese nation but also the Other and China’s relationship with the Other. Through the performances and carefully created montages of pre-recorded images, the gala weaves the cultural cosmos of China. In it, China is a cultural empire; the Chinese nation is a family with a common ancestor; the admission into the Chinese nation comes from submission to the blood tie and engagement in the “Chinese” cultural practices; and the communist state is the home that guards the common ancestor and shelters all family members. With the state’s investment in its annual production, the gala is much more than a cultural product marketed globally. It is also a key site for the state-sanctioned discursive project of constructing the Chinese nation and projecting China’s “soft power.” It enacts the cultural imagination that is propagated as a basis for how China must play her role in globalization. The alignment of the the state’s stake in interpellating its subjects and projecting its power and the commercial interests of CCTV as a state-owned profit-generating corporation is safeguarding its continuation in today’s new media environment.
* CEAS Issues in Contemporary East Asia Colloquium Series, cosponsored with the Center for Global Communication Studies