Abstract
The Cultural Revolution ended more than three decades ago and is generally concluded to have been a disaster and trauma; however, it kept resurfacing at different points throughout the past and being interpreted from different perspectives addressing contemporary concerns. TV, one of the most important channels for political communication in China, is closely supervised by the censoring mechanism. Despite political control, TV has also become a contending arena where discourses concerning the Cultural Revolution are negotiated and shaped. This article will juxtapose a text analysis of a recent TV drama Sent Down Youth (2012) with a study of its production and reception within Mainland China so as to map out the complexity and richness in the discursive debates about the Cultural Revolution and its representation. The research intends to explore how TV and social context both limit and at the same time enable discourses around representations and memories of the Cultural Revolution.
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution conventionally refers to a political movement in China dating from 1966 to 1976, which was initiated to fight against revisionism and bourgeois ideology in the party and the state, to consolidate a socialist system. The Cultural Revolution ended more than three decades ago and is generally concluded to have been a disaster and trauma; however, it kept resurfacing at different points throughout the past and being interpreted from different perspectives addressing contemporary concerns. 1 Dittmer (2002) has observed that epoch-making events like the Cultural Revolution ‘occur not once but many times, calling upon successive generations for repeated reinterpretation based on changing intellectual interests and cultural moods’ (p. ix). In present day China, the Cultural Revolution remains a sensitive topic: on the one hand, it is denounced as a mistake and a period of destruction; on the other hand, further exploration is prohibited. In mass media, immediately after the Cultural Revolution, there emerged many films depicting the political movement, such as Troubled Laughter (Kunaoren de xiao, 1979, dir. Yang Yanjin) and The Legend of Tianyun Mountain (Tianyunshan chuanqi, 1980, dir. Xie Jin), but Cultural Revolution films decreased in number in mid-1980s due to tighter control. 2 In the early 1990s, Farewell My Concubine (Bawang bieji, 1993), The Blue Kite (Lan fengzheng, 1993) and To Live (Huozhe, 1994) made by the Fifth-Generation directors Chen Kaige, Tian Zhuangzhuang and Zhang Yimou, respectively, all touched upon the Cultural Revolution and its traumatic imprints. These films were well received internationally, but encountered problems with being publicly released in Mainland China. The film In the Heat of the Sun (Yangguangcanlan de rizi) directed by Jiang Wen in 1995 provided an alternative memory of the Cultural Revolution when life was free and ideal for the adolescent. Since the late 1990s, nostalgia has become a trend in many Cultural Revolution films and TV dramas, as it captures the prevailing sentiment amidst rapid economic development. The above delineation reveals the shifts in, and the negotiation between, official and popular discourses concerning the Cultural Revolution. Meanwhile, it also discloses that the imposed restriction on the topic has, in fact, facilitated a multiplication of discourses, either resistant (like the banned films) or negotiated (like the nostalgia fever).
TV, one of the most important channels for political communication in China, is closely supervised by the censoring mechanism. Despite political control, TV has also become a contending arena where discourses concerning the Cultural Revolution are negotiated and shaped. Most TV dramas set in the Cultural Revolution period are about sent down youth, which literally means ‘educated youth’ in Chinese (zhishi qingnian or zhiqing) and refers to those urban middle school students who were sent to receive re-education from the peasants during the Up to the Mountain and Down to the Countryside Movement between 1968 and the late 1970s. Some educated youth had been sent to rural areas since the late 1950s, but it became a nationwide movement only after 1968 when the Cultural Revolution suspended college enrolment and caused huge numbers of unemployed high school students in cities. Sent down youth TV dramas often focus on the rural years of sent down youth during the Cultural Revolution or their lives after returning to cities. Liang Xiaosheng (henceforth Liang), a member of sent down youth, is one of the best-known authors to have extensively written about this group of people, and many of Liang’s works have been adapted into TV dramas, for instance, A Storm is Coming Tonight (Jinye you baofengxue, 1984) about the return of sent down youth to cities, Snow City (Xuecheng, 1987) on the lives of returning sent down youth in the city and The Annuals (Nianlun, 1994) about life stories of sent down youth from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Liang has criticized the fact that present TV dramas and films have ignored and understated the socialist past of China, especially the 10 years of the Cultural Revolution, and his recent TV drama Sent Down Youth (Zhiqing, 2012) is a response to this. 3 One interesting question arises here: as Liang criticizes other TV dramas for avoiding the history of the Cultural Revolution, how will he endeavour to represent a realistic past through the same medium? Moreover, what reignites Liang’s enthusiasm to readdress the topic after almost 20 years? This article is to explore how TV and social context both limit (as suggested in Liang’s criticism) and at the same time enable discourses around representations and memories of the Cultural Revolution. To answer these questions, I will juxtapose a textual analysis of the TV drama Sent Down Youth, with a study of its production and reception within Mainland China, to map out the complexity and richness in the discursive debates about the Cultural Revolution and its representation. Before that, it is worthwhile to have a look at the social, political and economic roles of TV in the PRC, which has both restricted, and simultaneously liberated, discourses on the past and the present.
Social, political and economic contexts of TV
Between 1958 (the inception year of China’s first TV station) and 1978 (the watershed year for economic reform), TV was far from a mass medium due to its limited accessibility and broadcast range, and during the socialist period when mass media were used mainly for disseminating political messages and propaganda, TV was not as influential as the media of press, radio and film (Yin, 2002). However, the development of the TV industry and the accessibility of TV sets within households has changed this situation. By 2010, there were 247 TV stations in Mainland China with a TV population coverage rate of 97.62% (State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT), 2011a; Wang, 2011). According to a 2011 CSM Media Research report, TV was the most often and widely consumed medium in China, as over 99% of those who used media watched TV, out of whom 89.4% were daily users, and the average TV viewing time per day per person in 2010 was 171 minutes (Wang, 2011). As one of the most widely consumed media in China, TV has ascended and been formalized as the most important means of political communication for the party and the state (Zhao and Guo, 2005), and SARFT (it was merged with General Administration of Press and Publication in March 2013) has reiterated that radio and TV stations have to ‘adhere to the nature of mouthpiece and the responsibility for public service and publicity’ 2011b. The political role of TV limits its representation and expression, but it also enables and justifies political readings of its products.
Another important aspect of the TV industry in China is its commercialization. Although all TV stations in China are state-owned, and are within the administrative and ideological control of the party and the state, they no longer rely on government subsidies and generate huge revenues as lucrative economic entities. In 2001, after China entered the World Trade Organization, TV and radio stations, at national and provincial levels, were encouraged to merge and form state-owned conglomerates that would benefit from market reform and better compete with international media products. According to the 2001 Notice on media reform, the newly formed media groups were public services (shiyexingzhi), but to be run as enterprises (qiyehuaguanli) (General Office of CCPCC and General Office of the State Council, 2001). The ambivalence of public service and enterprise in the definition of the media group was further complicated by the role of its regulator. In some cases, regional media groups and the regulation administrations overlapped with each other, such as the Golden Eagle Broadcasting System of Hunan Province. A more recent resolution of the conflation of TV stations’ dual role came in the 2009 Notice that advocated a ‘separation of production and broadcasting’, which started a new round of structural reform in which TV and radio stations were to be separated from business operations such as advertising, and were only responsible for public services such as producing news programmes and publicity (SARFT, 2009). Unlike the commissioning system in British TV industry, the ‘separation of production and broadcasting’ in China is not only an attempt to marketize the TV industry by introducing competition but also to secure ideological control by reasserting TV’s role as a mouthpiece.
China has a four-tier television structure: TV stations are set up at national, provincial, municipal and county levels, and all TV stations are state-owned and supervised by two interlocking systems: one is enforced by the party’s Department of Propaganda/Publicity and its local branches providing ideological guidance, and the other is implemented by SARFT and its local bureaus for regulation. In addition, TV stations should also double-check the content of TV programmes before their first broadcasting. According to a recent regulation of TV drama content (SARFT, 2010), TV dramas should serve the people and socialism, encouraging diversification and placing social benefit as their priority while incorporating economic interests, and they should not contain improper content that ‘endangers unification, sovereignty and territorial integrity’; ‘incites ethnic hatred or discrimination’; or ‘disrupts social order or undermine social stability’. However, there is no specific definition or detailed description of precisely what these contents are. This ambiguity of the criteria also reflects the fuzziness of the censoring system in China, where what is allowed or not allowed, official or non-official never stays clear cut, but is constantly subject to interpretation and shifts corresponding to social and political contexts.
Censorship, according to Foucault (1976), will trigger a discursive ferment rather than a massive repression; he noted that censorship of sex in the Age of Reason had in fact brought ‘an apparatus for producing an ever greater quantity of discourse about sex’ (pp. 18, 23). Moreover, the censored topic also becomes an important area of contestation where power relations are articulated through a multiplication of discourses (Foucault, 1976: 30). Drawing on Foucault, Kuhn (1988) has proposed the idea of productive censorship in her study of film censorship, as she argues that prohibition can produce unintended consequences not only in terms of resistance but also ‘effects of discursive production’ (pp. 127–128). In other words, censorship is productive because it is a process that is ‘produced within an array of constantly shifting discourses, practices, and apparatus’; hence, censorship is never fixed or monolithic, but embodies ‘complex and often contradictory relations of power’ (Kuhn, 1988: 127). In this regard, censorship or taboo has become a ‘focal point for understanding a changing social order’ (Staiger, 1995: 16). As one of the most important political communication channels in China, TV is under tight censorship. This censorship has, on the one hand, encouraged resistance and, on the other hand, hinted at the shifts in social context and power relations. Apart from the state and the market, intellectuals also try to seek places in the realm of TV to express their intellectual critique. Therefore, Chinese TV dramas become an epitome of the power relations and conflicts within different cultural formations: officialdom, the business sector and intellectuals (Yin, 2002). The following part will examine the construction of the Cultural Revolution in the TV drama Sent Down Youth and discover how political, commercial and intellectual considerations are incorporated into the representation, enabling a multiplication of discourses.
Construction of the past on TV
The TV drama Sent Down Youth, officially branded as ‘an inspirational epic of youth and growth’, was first screened on China Central Television (CCTV) channel one between 20.00 and 22.00 (18.00–22.00 is prime time for TV shows) from 29 May to 24 June 2012, and according to the official website of the TV drama, it stayed at the top of the ratings list during the same schedule time when it was on air. 4 The TV drama is about the lives of sent down youth in different parts of the country between 1969 and 1979, aiming at painting a panoramic picture of sent down youth across the nation. The TV drama was officially branded a historical drama rich in humanistic care (renwenqinghuai), with a grand narration (da changjing) and of large investment and high quality. Apart from branding the historical drama good quality, the producer Hou Hongliang (henceforth Hou) also believed the TV drama would have a solid audience base since there were about 17 million sent down youth across the nation. As programme ratings are becoming more crucial in the TV industry, Sent Down Youth justifies its potential market value by branding itself as a historical TV drama of good quality and with a broad viewership. However, concerning the discursive construction of the Cultural Revolution that remains a sensitive topic, political sanction is vital for the screening and circulations of the TV drama before addressing its market value. Apart from justifications for its commercial outlook, the TV drama has to justify itself within the political discursive framework and the social context. Why is it important to retell the story of sent down youth, and how is it retold? In other words, why does its playwright Liang feel the urge to write about the Cultural Revolution at this particular time?
Political context: against the red fever
In the late 1970s and 1980s, there emerged a body of literature, films and TV dramas that depicted the atrocity, hardship and sufferings of the Cultural Revolution, and these works were known as ‘scar literature’ or ‘wound literature’ (Shanghen wenxue), in which sent down youth were often the main characters.
5
When asked why he intended to write about sent down youth again 20 years later, Liang said,
In the 80s, we wrote a lot about the Cultural Revolution and other reflection literatures, so there was not much more to write about at that time … . However, reflections were not enough and history was gradually forgotten. Moreover, the red fever (fanhong) had resurfaced recently, so I decided to write about it (the Cultural Revolution) again.
In interviews, Liang mentioned the red fever in contemporary China and explicitly articulated that Sent Down Youth was created against such a fever. The rise of nostalgia of the socialist past surfaced amidst rapid economic development in the 1990s, but a more controversial and high-profile red wave emerged recently in Chongqing in 2008. The ‘red campaign’ in Chongqing abruptly ended due to the downfall of its municipal governor Bo Xilai in early 2012, only few months before the screening of the TV drama Sent Down Youth on CCTV.
In summer 2008, Chongqing initiated a ‘red campaign’, in which students, teachers, retirees and public servants were frequently assembled to sing ‘red songs’, songs composed to compliment the Communist Party of China (CPC) leadership in the revolution and struggle to found the PRC, and this campaign found its niche market among retirees. In addition to that, the campaign also included revisiting revolutionary stories and forwarding quotes from famous revolutionary figures on mobile phones. In January 2011, Chongqing Satellite TV Channel replaced its prime-time TV dramas with revolutionary programmes (such as red classics) in a bid to restore red morals. The campaign had triggered heated debate, some hailing it as an effort to resist the neo-liberalism in China, while some criticized it as a revival of the Cultural Revolution. In March 2012, the Party Chief of Chongqing and the main driving force behind the red campaign, Bo Xilai, was dismissed from his position and expelled from the party due to misconduct and allegation of his wife’s murder, which brought an abrupt halt to the red campaign. Chongqing TV station resumed its prime-time TV dramas and commercial advertisements in March 2012.
It was in this political and social context that the TV drama Sent Down Youth was promoted, at least ostensibly, as a repudiation of the resurgence of the Cultural Revolution fever. The critique fits well into the political discourse regarding the Cultural Revolution after the negation of the red fever in Chongqing. After the TV drama was broadcast on CCTV, in an interview Liang warned the danger of the Cultural Revolution fever:
I observed a trend of resurgence of the Cultural Revolution in today’s society. History of this particular period was first evaded, blocked and gradually became a vacuum; then it started to bring back the red culture through some red songs, theatres, and media representations. However, our younger generation have no experience or understanding of the past, and I feel responsible to retell it. The red fever is artificial and we can’t return to that era.
As affirmatively argued by Liang that the TV drama is an attempt to criticize the resurfacing Cultural Revolution fever, one question regarding this positioning is how and to what extent is Sent Down Youth critical in its representation? Or how is the representation of the Cultural Revolution in the TV drama in line with its positioned goal of being a critique? A detailed analysis at a textual level would help to answer the question.
TV for pedagogy: morality
In addition to his previous criticisms of the red fever, Liang also expressed that one of his major concerns was to emphasize (in the TV drama) the Cultural Revolution’s distortion of human nature and its impact on personality, as he said, ‘During that period, if people followed their (moral) principles, it would be detrimental to them. That was indeed a terrible era. To make this point clear is my real intention’. Despite Liang’s emphasis on ‘the distortion of human nature’ as posited in the interview, in fact the TV drama accentuates more on the kindness and youthfulness of sent down youth. In Sent Down Youth, passion and kindness become two key words for its depiction of the rusticated years during the Cultural Revolution, whereas criticism is directed towards several villainous characters that are the incarnation of the evil and responsible for the tragedy, and the villains are often isolated by most sent down youth. Paradoxically, this contradiction is also clearly elaborated by Liang when promoting the TV drama as a moral lesson:
I am not making a documentary of sufferings of sent down youth, as many of my previous works had already touched upon this issue and I thought that was enough. Meanwhile, what I’ve found missing in the previous works is the depiction of sent down youth’s spiritual growth. Through this TV drama, I want to reveal the kindness of human beings. And this kindness is not to whitewash the era, but to show how we upheld kindness even in that special era.
According to Liang, the spiritual growth means sent down youth had come to realize and began to reflect on the political movement before the Cultural Revolution ended, and Liang believes this reflection has been understated in previous works about sent down youth. Nevertheless, Liang’s own comments seem to contradict each other, rendering him in a conundrum that, on the one hand, he asserts that the TV drama is a critique of the Cultural Revolution and its negative impacts on humanity; on the other hand, he believes kindness should be the main theme of the TV drama. This paradox also signifies the ambivalence in the official discourse regarding the Cultural Revolution, as the official framework calls for a negation of the movement while inhibits further exploration that might undermine the political regime. In the TV drama, the distortion of personality happens to a small group of villains who were responsible for causing the chaos, while most sent down youth upheld integrity and kindness. Hence, the Cultural Revolution becomes an absent evil from the outside, and its existence is only to test the goodness of the youth. In this way, the TV drama fulfils its pedagogical function by highlighting kindness and morality.
Both the playwright and the producer of the TV drama expressed that this play was an endeavour to affirm a set of values that was lost in the present. As Liang said,
Resentment is not the theme of the TV drama … I hope if Zhou Ping and Wu Min in the TV drama are still alive now, when they meet again, they can just smile and forget about all the hatred and grudges. People are not taught to forgive and are often apathetic to the kindness of human beings … I hope the younger generation will watch the TV drama and learn about history.
In addition, Liang also shared his view on the function of cultural works and explained why he chose to focus on kindness in the representation as it was related to his belief that ‘the very nature of literature and art is to make people better, and the ultimate goal of our culture is to establish an ideal’.
Paradox of the TV drama
From the above analysis of the TV drama, it reveals a discrepancy between the branding of the TV drama as a critique of the Cultural Revolution (and the resurging red fever) and the representation in the TV drama that praises sent down youth and their morality. One possible explanation for these ambivalent discourses is that the framing of the TV drama as a critique of the Cultural Revolution is enabled by the shifting political context, while the emphasis on morality and kindness is more a tradition of safer representation within the official framework. However, it would be arbitrary to rule out the possibility that the TV drama did, in the first place, intend to offer a critical reading of the Cultural Revolution and the red fever in the contemporary, since Liang began to write the screenplay in 2009, only 1 year after the start of the red campaign in Chongqing. If this were the case, a second explanation for the inconsistency between the positioning of and the representation in the TV drama, would be that the awareness of (self) censorship as what might be allowed under the official framework, has limited a full development of the critique and shifted its focus to moral education. The producer Hou once disclosed that
We have a leader (Wang Min, the provincial secretary-general and former director of the provincial propaganda department) as our gatekeeper, and it is not likely that the TV drama is politically problematic. Moreover, we focus on the rusticated experience of sent down youth, and do not touch upon why they had to go up to the mountains and down to the countryside, neither do we discuss their return to cities; so with only one excerpt in the middle, it is not sensitive.
The censoring mechanism limits the representation of the past and undermines the critical intention and potential of the TV drama. On the contrary, the political context enables the positioning of the TV drama as a critique of the Cultural Revolution. The ambiguous and even contradictory discourses concerning the Cultural Revolution as revealed in the TV drama and its promotion are manifestations of the ambiguity and contingency of the censoring mechanism in China. It is this ambiguity and reliance on context that limits, but at the same time liberates, discourses on the Cultural Revolution and the TV drama. Furthermore, censorship and political and social contexts facilitate discourse, not only in the production and promotion of the TV drama, but also in its reception. As Sent Down Youth is positioned corresponding to the political context (as a critique) and conforms to the official framework and the pedagogical role of TV (as moral education), the reception of the TV drama also takes into account the political context and the role of TV and censorship, albeit different perspectives. The following section will explore how the political context and perceptions of TV generate different understandings of the TV drama among its audience, which further complicates discourses around the Cultural Revolution and the TV drama.
Deconstruction of the TV drama
By studying audience’s reviews of the TV drama Sent Down Youth via posts on Sina Weibo, a popular Twitter-like service in China, this section will try to discover how people’s understandings of political context and TV in China encourage different strands of readings. The growing interaction between the consumption of TV and the Internet makes it sensible to take Weibo as a source for audience responses, as there were more than 39,552 post results under the key words ‘TV drama Sent-Down Youth’ on Weibo between 29 May and 24 June 2012, around 1500 posts per day when the TV drama was first screened on CCTV. 6 The following section is not going to cover all the different online responses to the TV drama, since it would be impractical and digressive to encompass a comprehensive audience study, which is not the aim and theme of this article. Instead, I will focus on some of the responses that agree, complement or contend with the discourses constructed around the TV drama, in order to disclose how the same political context and censoring mechanism have facilitated a different strand of interpretation.
Some audience members receive Sent Down Youth as is expected by the producer, embracing the morality and values highlighted in the TV drama and affirming its pedagogical function. For instance, a Weibo user named ‘Qi Shiming in Shengjing’ commented that ‘the TV drama is a mirror of the present, and its passionate and kind characters make people in the present realize their petty and low morality, indulgence in materialism and no ideals’. This response clearly echoes the intention of the playwright and the producer, fulfilling the pedagogical role of the TV drama. However, some of the audience members have nuanced interpretations. The political and social contexts become fertile soil for the rudiment of different and interesting impressions of the TV drama. Among these genuine and intriguing interpretations, there’s an interesting strand that challenges the framing of the TV drama as a critique of the Cultural Revolution, and a moral lesson for the present as asserted by the producer.
Political context: praising the new leaders
The rise and negation of the red fever constituted the political and cultural background against which the TV drama Sent Down Youth was produced and promoted. However, some audience members see the TV drama as another political metaphor, not exactly the one its playwright Liang had expected people to see. Rather than relating the TV drama to the Cultural Revolution fever, some tend to link the play to the new party leaders to be elected later that year. For instance, one Weibo user named ‘Yuemingxingxi’ retweeted an excerpt from a report about President Xi Jinping’s rusticated years and commented that
The TV drama Sent Down Youth portrays the lives of the Cultural Revolution generation and how they rose as phoenix from the ashes (yuhuochongsheng); it seems that some of the main characters in the play are based on some prototypes of the generation.
By juxtaposing the TV drama with the news report about Xi, the comment discloses a connection between the two. This kind of association between the TV drama and life stories of the new leaders is not a single case, as many people have posted similar observations. Another audience member named ‘Muyi_Yang’ made a more direct point: ‘among the new leadership, four of them have rusticated experiences … and this reminds people of the TV drama Sent Down Youth. Watch it if one wants to know more about that era’. Clearly, here the audience also refers to the political context when decoding the TV drama, although they focus on another strand of the context. Of the seven members of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau, the top leaders of the party and the state, elected in November 2012 at the 18th National Congress of CPC, five of them, Xi Jinping, Li Keqiang, Zhang Dejiang, Wang Qishan and Liu Yunshan used to be sent down youth, and many other members in the Political Bureau also had rusticated experience during the Cultural Revolution era. The TV drama was broadcast after the negation of the so-called Chongqing red fever and a few months before the election of the new leaders in November. As TV is generally conceived as an important channel of disseminating political messages in China, a TV drama being broadcasted on CCTV is often regarded as a paradigm of the official discourse. Therefore, a political interpretation of the TV drama among the audience is never a surprise. Moreover, perceiving the TV drama as implicit praise for the new leaders is also in accordance with the portrayal of the enthusiasm and kindness of sent down youth in the TV drama. While Liang’s interpretation of the TV drama as a critique contradicts his emphasis on kindness in the representation, the audience tends to see the drama from another political perspective; the TV drama as a eulogy of the new leaders, which seems less contradictory to its representation, and more convincing.
Moreover, in the TV drama, the rusticated experience of one of the main characters Zhao Shuguang (henceforth Zhao) coincided with the life story of the new President Xi, as both Xi and Zhao joined the party during their rural years and became branch Party Secretary there. Even the place chosen for shooting Zhao’s story in the TV drama is only several kilometres away from the exact village once Xi stayed. Although the playwright Liang denied that Zhao in the TV drama was based on Xi, it was hard for the audience not to make such an association given their similar life routes. Apart from the interesting decoding of the underlying meanings of the TV drama, some audience members are more critical towards the TV drama as they regard it as an effort to please the new leaders, and thus lacking integrity. One Weibo user named ‘Windmill Warrior’ commented on the TV drama:
(It) is officially highly praised, whereas being criticised strongly among many people. And this is inevitable in contemporary China, where the official values stand in sharp contrast with the people’s. However, Liang Xiaosheng’s choice (of writing the play) is out of careful calculations. Why he spent great effort writing up the screenplay? It is nothing more than paying tribute to those who are going to be the pillars of the country and in the hope of being promoted by them. In this sense, Liang’s work has no integrity.
This kind of interpretation and criticism can also find its supporters online. Another user called ‘Zhangrabbit’ also noticed the discrepancy in the receptions of the TV drama in the official media and among the people: ‘while the government praises the TV drama highly for “promoting the main melody,” the people increasingly criticize it for fabricating lies and praising the evil in order to fawn and adulate some people’. In these comments the audience sees the TV drama in a political context, and arrives at a conclusion that the representation is fabricated. Different from the positioning of the playwright, the political context has incubated another kind of political interpretation of the TV drama among the audience, and this has led to distrust of the representation and the medium. The distrust, in fact, has long embedded in audiences’ understanding of TV as a political medium, and this also encourages another strand of critical interpretation of the TV drama.
TV for ideology control: mistrust
Apart from the political context, some of the audience group incline to take into account the medium’s role when decoding the TV drama, and in this case, censorship and TV’s role of ideological control, have triggered unintended discourses around the representation of the Cultural Revolution. Instead of targeting the TV drama, some audience members aim their criticisms at CCTV. A Weibo user named ‘Jiang Jiayi’ commented that
This TV drama has not shown enough criticism towards the trauma brought up by the political movement, but it is understandable given the fact that it is a CCTV play (allowed to be broadcast on CCTV). And I think the original novel shouldn’t be like this.
In this comment, the audience distrusts TV, CCTV in particular, as a credible source for representations of the past, especially if the past is still politically sensitive. Moreover, according to Jiang Jiayi, the book, as a medium for memorizing the past, seems to be more critical and reliable than TV, although there is no evidence to show whether the novel based on the screenplay of the TV drama is of that much difference. This kind of criticism derives from people’s awareness of TV’s pedagogical and ideological function, as well as the censoring mechanism that determines what is allowed on screen. Another Weibo user called ‘Lawyer Zhu Guangrong’ also expressed similar discontent with CCTV as the comment revealed:
It (the TV drama) praises the Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement, but where is the reflection on the Cultural Revolution? CCTV is not the moral high ground, though it possesses discursive power (huayuquan).
From this message, it is evident that the reviewer is fully conscious of the dominant power TV, or CCTV, has in the forming of political, social and cultural discourses, as she or he uses the phrase ‘discursive power’. As the most widely consumed and closely supervised state-owned medium in China, TV’s discursive power benefits from the hegemony of official discourse and the monopoly of the TV industry (although witnessing growing competitions among regional TV stations, they are still within one system). This discursive power, in turn, is conducive to the disseminating of official discourse and reinforces its industrial monopoly. Nevertheless, this discursive power also cultivates resistance, enabling criticism and suspiciousness of the constructed representations on TV. Some audience members express their doubts about the credibility of the TV drama, targeting at censorship, as one member named ‘Libuyifang’s weibo’ responded:
The ending of the TV drama Sent Down Youth was abrupt: it was in 1976 when sent down youth were fighting the forest fire, but why it abruptly jumped to1979 when all sent down youth went back to cities? There was no transitional or relevant shot before the ending. I searched online and found that SARFT had cut ten more episodes. I don’t know what to say.
Ostensibly, ‘Libuyifang’ accuses SARFT for disrupting the fluent flow of the TV drama by cutting short the ending. Beneath that, it also alludes to a fact that the TV drama, being censored by SARFT, is not a whole and credible picture of the past. The representation of sent down youth in the TV drama is filtered and regulated by the state censoring mechanism, and thus, it requires a more critical interpretation. To clarify, there is no direct evidence to show that the cut of the TV drama is ordered by SARFT, despite ‘Libuyifang’s’ accusation. According to the regulation decree, CCTV should check the TV drama before broadcasting, although the TV drama had already obtained permission for production and distribution from SARFT’s local bureau. The producer Hou said that the TV drama got good feedback from the censor group of CCTV during their pre-screening check, and the playwright Liang also disclosed that
The censor group made few amendments to the major plot line of the TV drama, except some suggestions for the ending. In the original version, many female sent down youth died in their battle against the forest fire. I guess some in the censor group felt sympathetic towards these girls and suggested that ‘they were all good girls’. Finally, the ending avoided a clear message about their death and was a little bit vague.
From Liang’s words, it is CCTV rather than SARFT that is responsible for the abrupt ending of the TV drama. In ‘Libuyifang’s’ comment, she or he conflates CCTV with SARFT or regards them as the same in one system. The conflation of the two different organs, a TV station and a governmental administration, in audiences’ perception, in fact, is emblematic of the conflation within the TV industry in China, where the administration and TV station share similar responsibility in censoring and self-censoring TV programmes, and TV station bears the dual role of commercial/public service and a political organ.
According to Liang, the censor group of CCTV expressed that ‘as long as the TV drama has cultural significance, and is not solely about denunciation, we are not “left-wing” all the way down, and in this sense Sent Down Youth is exemplary’. What can be implied from CCTV’s censor group’s comments on Sent Down Youth is that censorship is not ‘left-wing all the way down’; rather it is flexible depending on whether the work has any cultural values, which is up to interpretation within particular social and political contexts. Interestingly, the censor also joins the audience and the producer in the forming of discourses around censorship. To the censor, the ideological control does not stay rigid or unchanged; instead, it shifts in regard to context. Therefore, the contextualized nature of censorship enables political readings of cultural works, as the wavering censorship signifies shifts in social context.
The tangled relationship between the producer and the censor indicates, and also complicates the cultural landscape in China, where the market and the politics confront and compromise with each other. And this intriguing relationship has brought about an alliance between them which ‘has functioned to advance mainstream television shows that are both ideologically inoffensive and commercially successful’ (Zhu, 2012). Media groups and the administrations join together in an effort to help local media survive and prosper in the market, while at the same time to maintain the function of TV as an effective propaganda institution. This, on the other hand, further encourages mistrust of TV among audience, and the mistrust in turn leads to political or cynical readings of TV dramas.
Conclusion
Sent Down Youth is positioned as a critique of the Cultural Revolution and the resurfacing red culture in the present after a political negation of the red campaign in Chongqing. However, the TV drama glorifies the morality and sacrifices of sent down youth in the hope of providing moral lessons, such as altruism and kindness, for the present society. This glorification has overwhelmed the critique and become the most important theme. The contradiction in the construction of the TV drama reveals the ambivalence in the official discourse regarding the Cultural Revolution. The discourse shifts corresponding to political and social contexts, and TV, and as a mouthpiece of the party-state, becomes an arena where these shifts can be disseminated and detected. However, this has encouraged political readings of the TV drama among its audience. The encoded meanings are not necessarily decoded in the intended way, as some audience members perceive the TV drama as a paean to the new leaders who share similar experiences of being sent down youth, while other members mistrust the representation on screen because of the political role of TV and censorship. The context and censorship have limited while at the same facilitated discourses on the Cultural Revolution and the TV drama.
In this case, the Cultural Revolution is, to great extent, used as a trope to address present concerns, regardless of being a critique or a moral lesson. Using it as a trope is partially the reason why people constantly refer back to the Cultural Revolution for the utterance of present concerns. The Cultural Revolution keeps being discussed in the past and present not only because it is a rich mine for different interpretations but also because its legacy remains, especially in the cultural sphere. The contradiction within the construction, and between the construction and reception of the TV drama Sent Down Youth, indicates the prohibition and production of censorship, and this dual function of political control also existed during the Cultural Revolution. The playwright Liang believes that the underground reflection and resistance appeared and prevailed during the Cultural Revolution. Moreover, Paul Clark (2008) has also argued that, despite strict political control, ‘the Cultural Revolution was also a time of considerable creative energy, official and unofficial’, and even the orthodox art and literature never obliterated the underground, unsanctioned creativity of the amateurs. Both in the past and the present, political context and censorship have been productive, generating both constructive and deconstructive discourses.
Footnotes
Funding
This research has been funded by the China Scholarship Council.