The Europe in two billion eyes: Images from Chinese television

Europeans in China

The productions focusing on transnational family dynamics generally appear in two forms: stories of Chinese who work with families of Westerners in China and those of mixed couples who start families straddling two continents. In both cases misunderstandings surge, often, due to the racist and intolerant attitudes of the non-Chinese characters. On the bases of symbolic and interpretative anthropology of Victor Turner (2001), we can assume that there is a shift regarding the cultural tensions that the stories attempt to define and resolve.

For many years, the character of the European in China (and the foreigner in general) was played by the well-known actor Dashan (literally ‘Big Mountain’), the Chinese stage name adopted by Canadian Mark Henry Rowswell. Rowswell starred in several Chinese TV series as leading actor, and occasionally in cameo roles, in which he was ‘the Stranger’, with capital S, able to speak Chinese without an accent.

The foreigners in the ‘Foreigners’ governess’, however, have a sharp cultural connotation and a strong foreign accent. Few strokes are enough to create a ‘stereotype’ image that can be shared by the Chinese audience. The series produced by Shanghai TV, ‘Foreigners’ governess’ has three protagonists – all women workers who lost their jobs as a result of the reform of the industrial system. ¹ These workers are trained as domestic helpers for foreigners, thanks to a training programme during which they learn the essentials of this job: English language, the basics of home economics (especially how to iron) and ‘cross-cultural etiquette’. The evolution of the drama allows viewers to see intimate, domestic scenes of foreigners from different countries through the everyday work experiences of the three women. The drama criticizes the European powers that occupied China, not long ago, forcing the imperial government to treat them favourably. As Haiyan Lee states:

Owing to the privileged status of the private over the public, employment in the households of foreigners doubles as a kind of apprenticeship that grants more direct access to the essence of being global than does employment in a foreign firm or joint venture. If Chinese elites have agonized for a century trying to discover the source of the West’s wealth and power, fixating on its gunboats and cannons, constitutions and elections, novels and plays, there is a sense in the serial that the true source has at long last been identified: the values and sentiments underlying the Westerner’s private life and self. Thus it falls not on Chinese managers or secretaries but on nannies to act as the spy-apprentice-ambassadors who will link China up with the rail tracks of the world (yu shijie jiegui), starting at the intimate terminal of domestic life (Lee, 2006: 516).

The following scene illustrates such an attitude of disfavour toward the Chinese. The housekeeper is preparing a delicious duck for dinner, when Mrs Ingram enters her luxurious kitchen, wearing an impeccable suit. She looks at the contents of a pot on the stove and mumbles: ‘Am I supposed to drink this soup? Rather, then I’ll throw it out of the window.’ ²

Hence the following dialogue:

Pardon? You said what, Mrs Ingram?

It’s not your business.

Mrs Ingram, Mr Ingram very very like laoyatang, ³ you know? Ah. ‘Kwa’ ‘kwa’ ‘kwa’ duck tang. Ah. Madam, food party, food, cooking what? Please tell me.

Soup, salad, spaghetti, many, many things.

Sorry, I don’t know.

Oh my God! It is just like talking to a deficient! Mikey!? You must learn English hard like Mao.

You are right, I must study English like Mao, but you must study Chinese like Denise Moore. This is China, you know?

I hate Chinese, I hate Chinese characters, they look like marks of ghosts. (Foreigners’ governess XI episode)

The hypothesis that the Ingrams’ attitude towards the Chinese is pure prejudice is confirmed by their detachment which conceal distrust toward their maid and, at the same time, their desire to take advantage of her. We see Ingrams tasting a good cup of tea and watching a video they made while she was working. In the video she finds jewels they are hided to check her honesty (Shewai Baomu, episodes X, XI and XII). Finally, to avoid paying the housekeeper, they accuse her of having broken a precious and ancient Chinese porcelain plate, which eventually then turns out to be a vulgar imitation of little value. In other words, the Ingrams are represented as xenophobic, full of themselves, and deceptive.

As Lin Hua observes in a best-selling book The Bad European (Choulou de ouzhouren): ⁴

We can say, without exaggeration, that many British features as their conservatism, their pride, their sense of superiority, their xenophobia, as well as their desire to conquer the whole world, were possible because they live in an island (Lin, 2002: 138).

British tradition plays a positive role, according to Chinese respondents, as long as it is considered as a moral reference, but it becomes a limit when it only serves to justify a supposed cultural superiority.

The Italians in ‘Love in Sicily’ (Qing xi Xixili), a TV drama in 26 episodes, filmed between Catania (six episodes) and Hangzhou, are as old-fashioned and conservative as the Ingrams. ⁶ The drama tells the story of the marriage breakdown of a Chinese–Italian couple. The couple lives in Hangzhou in a modern house, with their son Jacopo and the mother-in-law.

When an old boyfriend of the Italian woman arrives, the delicate balance breaks down and the absence of her husband is so unbearable for the Italian woman, who also has to deal with her mother-in-law, that she decides to return to Italy with her son. The viewer understands differences within the couple through the lens of the cultural differences between the two countries. The ‘real Italy’ of the drama is condensed into a few exterior scenes and few rooms of the two houses. In one of this scene the woman’s father, a nobleman heir of an Italian aristocratic family, brings the Chinese TV viewer around Catania, driving his far-fetched Lancia Ardea, a famous Italian car produced between the 1939 and the 1953, with a coat of arms on the doors and a right-side steering wheel. The unreal scenes of urban life in Sicily include police chases on horseback, rough men who eat living fish in market stalls, and violent fights motivated by all sorts of nonsense (Love in Sicily XII episode). The countryside is equally folkloric, inhabited by farmers who, dressed like nineteenth-century peasants, collect olives with the ancient old fashion technique of beating the trees with sticks.

To sum up, the Sicily of ‘Love in Sicily’ appears as a place from the nineteenth century. The atmosphere is symbolically represented by salons where you eat by candlelight and listen to music from gramophones, where kitchens have copper tools and wooden stoves, residents use rotary phones, and heavy drapery curtains hang from the ceiling. Italy is also depicted as pre-industrial country, a place of dirty old palaces where noblemen keep swords and muskets arranged in every corner of the house to defend the honour of relatives and friends.

Yet, despite the fact that Chinese guests, often challenged to noble duels, help the Italians to clean their houses and to make order out of chaos. Significant cultural progress are only made by the Italians when they leave Italy to live in a China, where they finally tie the knot with Chinese partners with whom they have had a fight in the previous 25 episodes. Additionally, the ‘Italy’ depicted in drama seems an unsuitable place to start a family. As the Chinese explain: ‘people here drink, eat, laze around, walk, do things without sense’ (Love in Sicily XI episode); the Italians ‘rest 60% of the time and work 40%’ (Love in Sicily X episode); and ‘Italians live happily ever after, in what we would call Utopia’ (Love in Sicily XI episode). The Italians finally leave their homeland. They can do that because, as Lin Hua explains, ‘they are related neither to their nation, nor to men or political parties, and even less to the other Italians. Nothing justifies the sacrifice of their lives for a cause’ (Lin, 2002: 237). In other words, they have no political ideals or patriotism.

For the Italians of ‘Love in Sicily’, the ideal is to enjoy work and life; it is primarily the enjoyment of life that brings success. This way of life is what all other countries of the world envy and dream about. ⁷

Internal conflicts within mixed couples of the drama are often an instrument to unveil the differences of their cultural identity. In the ‘Love in Sicily’ are two couples, Jacopo’s parents and grandparents. In the first, the wife is Italian. She is a stubborn and dreamy woman who is unable to understand her husband because she ‘has not yet understood the culture and the lifestyle of the Chinese’ (Love in Sicily II episode). She cannot realize that her husband’s full-time job, including the time he spends in the massage centre and karaoke bars, is a demonstration of conjugal love. According to her, marriage and love are being a faithful partner in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad times, in joy as well as in sorrow, which means, for this character, being together all the time. The problems of the second couple lie in the different understanding of the terms ‘privacy’ and ‘family’.

The European’s understanding of privacy could be defined as follows: ‘Information about my life is sensitive and personal and belongs to me. Nobody can see or access to this without my express knowledge or permission’ (Love in Sicily V episode). That definition is in striking contrast to with the way privacy is understood by the Chinese: ‘Information about your life is our information that we intend to make accessible and shareable to all members of the family, especially to the head of the family, who must look over everything’ (Love in Sicily V episode).

Finally, the Italians of this drama are described as people prone to act fuelled by passion. They are excessive in their emotions and reactions (Li, 2006). This excess produces failure. They are ‘tough, stubborn and self-centred’, ‘romantic dreamers’ able to give up everything for love, but unable to mediate between their romantic desires and family values. Their lack of emotional balance turns even virtues into defects (Varriano, 2010). The uncontrolled expression of emotions is opposed to the ‘Doctrine of the Mean’, considered in Chinese philosophical tradition as the ‘greater good every action’ is measured by. In the eyes of the Chinese the centrality of the ‘Doctrine of the Mean’ is unconceivable for uncivilized barbarians. In other words, one of the message promoted by ‘Love in Sicily’ is that, regardless of Italy’s ancient culture, non-Chinese barbarians can only ‘evolve’ through the love of their partners and the entry into the civilised, technologically and economically advanced Chinese culture.

In the final scenes of the drama, the European noble lord becomes a waiter in the teahouse where the mistress is his daughter’s mother-in-law. This grotesque image suggests that the world of television might succeed where political enthusiasm has failed. This conclusion implies that Chinese culture will succeed in realising the world from European capitalists and exploiters, transforming the latter from noblemen into servants.

The idea of Europeans coming from these TV dramas is present also in other Chinese works and it is supported by fieldworks. If, on one hand, this proves that television, as a bard who entertains its audience, expresses a common sense, as intended by Gramsci, on the other hand it shows that the personal relationships between people from different cultures described in television simplified and solved real international tensions. Words such as human rights, respect for privacy and for diversity are terms used in the diplomatic discussion, but here are only outlined and always end in situations where the ‘closed’ positions of the non-Chinese fail. The non-Chinese is sometimes a simple cheater, aiming to exploit Chinese workers (as for the Ingrams), but he is also able to recognise the limits of his culture, leaving his country to reach the more civilised China (as for the Italians). Here again we find an idea of the world outside China which is not that far from the definition of the four seas of the barbarians in classical Chinese texts.

Nowadays, the four seas of the barbarians are still – as Marcel Granet explained in La Pensee chinoise (1934: 84) – an inorganic space delimiting the ordered space of China, where people cannot manage their emotions (thus are barbarians). The analysis of the TV experiences lived by the Chinese abroad aims to verify this hypothesis.

Chinese in Europe

Television started its representation of the migrants in 1993 with China’s popular TV drama ‘A Beijing Man in New York’ (Beijing ren zai Niuyue) (Huot, 2000: 60--64). After the success of the programme variations of this drama were produced: ‘Shanghai men in Tokyo’, ‘Lost in Los Angeles’, ‘Tears Shed in Sydney’, ‘Goodbye Vancouver’, ‘Time zone between husband and wife’ set in Toronto (Nyíri, 2009). Europe does not appear as a location of any of this drama, since Europe was not yet recognised as destination of migration, but rather a tourist one. France, Spain and Italy are not considered as the places where Chinese going to make money but countries where the Chinese relatives live are appealing because of their tradition in the arts and in the football.

Europe appears very late in the Chinese television stories in a world when the distinction between Eastern and Western Europe was an idea of another era. The first TV drama shot in Europe is the Southeast Fujian TV serial ‘Into Europe’ (Zouru ouzhou) from 1999, based on a novel by A Hang, director Chen Kemin. This drama examines the clash between the rules of family-managed migration from Qingtian, Zhejian Province, a traditional sending area of migrants to Europe, with the individualism of the modern migrant. An ‘overseas Chinese family’ agrees with their cousin in China that the cousin’s daughter will come to Italy to marry their Italian-born son. The plot is kept secret from the girl, and after a clash with the host family, she elopes, not with her original paramour who joined her in coming to Italy, but with the repentant snakehead ⁸ who had stolen her passport. The male protagonist of the drama – the heroine’s original boyfriend – arrives in Paris in a torn T-shirt without a penny. After a few months, he is a manager in a company owned by an ‘old’ overseas Chinese and proposes to a French art agent to open a Chinese art gallery. In fluent French, he praises Chinese reforms and informs the Frenchman that he has already secured the support of the Chinese embassy and funding from China. The Frenchman, impressed, agrees. His status soon surpasses that of his former benefactor and boss. (Nyíri, 2005: 165)

This drama opens the way for a ‘new migrant’ literature in Europe, a destination commonly referred to in Chinese movies as ‘a new world ’ (Xin tiandi), a revealing in pun on the Old World/New World dichotomy established by old Europe’s relation with the Americas. The ‘new migrant’ – an official and media term usually applied to those who have left China after 1978 – is a symbolic figure of a new, globally modern and yet authentically national way of being Chinese. He is successful in the global capitalist economy and rises to a position of economic and political power in the country that epitomises modernity and power (Nyíri, 2005).

The TV dramas set in USA in the 90 s are the prototype for the dramas of the new millennium. With the increasing global flow of capital, image, ideology and greater possibilities for international travelling, the world became at once more familiar and more exotic (Yan, 2009). Due in part to globalisation, Chinese TV productions began filming in Europe, but at the same time European host countries became more interested in the images broadcasted by Chinese television.

The first European–Chinese television drama ‘The Secrets of Shanghai, ⁹ for example, is co-produced by Factotum Barcelona and Shanghai New Culture Film & TV Drama Centre of Shanghai Media Group and broadcasted on television in both countries. It tries to portray a Spain and a China that appeal to both Spanish and Chinese viewers. ¹⁰

This effort at satisfying two distinct audiences is obvious in considering how the programme presents outdoor spaces. ‘The Secrets of Shanghai’ is a clear synthesis of not only the will of the Spanish to show the touristic aspects of Barcelona (there are many shots of the buildings of Gaudi, scenes of bullfighting, the Rambla, the beaches and the sea), but also the will of the Chinese to propose a European country that respects television standards of the modern metropolis, identified by images of huge avenues, grand high-rise buildings, spacious private homes, luxurious automobiles and the glamorous fashion as seen in other transnational dramas.

The drama is a hybrid between a detective story and a history of migration. It tells the double story of the rich millionaire Lin Bainian and his illegitimate daughter Li Ran. They find themselves living in Barcelona next to each other, unaware of their real identity.

‘The Secrets of Shanghai’ closely examines ‘luxury migration’, or the stories of those migrants who succeed in late twentieth century world of expanding economies. Luxury migration applies to different generations of immigrants. On the one hand, we have characters like Mr Lin Bainian, who migrated to Spain from a city near Shanghai in the early 80 s and who manages to become one of the richest men in Spain. On the other hand, the drama also considers younger migrants, such as the Chen brothers. Born in China, they leave in order to escape gangsters and gambling debts, attend school in the US and obtain green cards, and soon to become managers in major companies in the new economy.

The story begins when Lin Bainian, who is diagnosed with a serious heart condition, returns to China to meet with his daughter from an earlier marriage and return to Barcelona with her. But in China, Lin Bainian is deceived first by the official who was tasked to help him to find his daughter, and then by the young actress who pretends to be his daughter in order to return to Europe with him. Meanwhile, his real daughter, Li Ran, goes to Spain in search of her betrothed Chen Han, who disappeared on the day of their wedding. She is sure that her betrothed is in Spain because she knows well his love for soccer and in particular for the FC Barcelona club and Leo Messi.

In this drama through daring escapes, intrigues and threats from the Hong Kong gangland, viewers have the opportunity to meet Chinese skilled businessmen, like the Chen brothers, who travel to Spain because Spain is among the countries ‘with one of the most developed enterprise cultures in the world, where to open a new business is even faster than in the US’ (IX episode) and, also, ‘because it has a good business foundation and, unlike in the US, where the economy tends to saturate, the growth opportunities are huge’ (The Secrets of Shanghai XIII episode).

The Europe we see in ‘The Secrets of Shanghai’ is mainly institutional. There are very few non-Chinese who revolve around the main characters, and all of them are officials in the performance of their duties, mainly are police officers. The police officers in the drama are particularly skilled and efficient in their investigations. Such vision of an efficient police and a tolerant European multi-ethnic society is completely reversed in the CCTV drama entitled ‘A family of Wenzhou’ (Wenzhou yi jia ren), ¹¹ where we witness the comic scenes of Italian policemen, reminiscent of the television movie Pinocchio by Comencini, duped by one of the protagonists of the drama: A Yu, a teenager from the rural district of Yu Ruian, who is forced by his father to flee to Italy to make money.

A Yu lives between France and Italy. The two nations are not identifiable as deeply different and even seem to be speaking the same language. Indeed, the young girl studies without difficulty in both Prato and Paris, and her lover, a young French man named Leo, has no problem moving his activities as a lawyer from Paris to Italy, depending on where his heart leads him. France and Italy seem to be the television illustration of their Chinese names: France is the country of the law and Italy is the place where everyone thinks mostly about profit. ¹²

French experiences reverse her idea of a country vibrant that offers ‘more opportunities to earn’ (A family of Wenzhou XIII episode) and ‘gives respect to freedom and equality, where, if you just have talent and support the battle, everything is possible’ (A family of Wenzhou XXIII episode). She finds herself in a country tyrannised by law, where justice puts a stop to all her business ventures through complex legal mechanisms and a Kafkaesque bureaucracy.

In Italy, instead, A Yu deals with a public opinion manipulated by entrepreneurs that hinder her initiatives with a clever xenophobic propaganda able even to influence policy. In the ‘Secrets of Shanghai’ Spain is a multi-ethnic country, offering equal opportunities to everyone, given that you respect their laws, whereas in ‘A family of Wenzhou’ Italy and France are countries where the public is controlled, due to their prejudices against foreigners. The same law, which guarantees everyone in Spain, in France is a difficult-to-overcome weapon for foreigners.

It does not surprise that ‘A family of Wenzhou’, the drama with no foreign funding and the best audience achievements, should be the one which praises Europe less. It confirms the idea that the Chinese public does not consider the world outside its borders in tones of praise. Nevertheless, unlike what happened in the dramas filmed in the US, such as the famous ‘A Beijing men in New York’, in these European countries success is achievable, coexistence is possible, even if female protagonists have many obstacles to overcome.

However, the economic success of the Chinese, rather than showing the opening of Europe to foreigners, is another proof of the superior Chinese culture, their entrepreneurial ability, overcoming the absurd obstacles created by the Europeans. It confirms the role played by television in promoting the virtues of free market and commercialism. A family of Wenzhou is the only drama that is still broadcasted, its plot being the key to its success as a television product.

What is most striking about the image of Europe on Chinese TV is its limited representation. Few stories in Chinese TV dramas actually take place in Europe, and few succeed at representing a national dimension of any single country. In these dramas many elements of immigration law, global economics and entrepreneurship are simplified, inaccurately portrayed, or ignored altogether.

Fiction offers valuable material to understand the world we live in. Television fiction comments and remoulds issues of our personal and social life without being either completely accurate or distorted (Schneider, 2008). This quick analysis is intended as a starting point to think about a less chino-centric television narration, in order to avoid the risks of misrepresentation found in the Chinese social context. Factotum Barcelona and Shanghai New Culture Film & TV Drama Centre of Shanghai Media Group seem to have succeeded in a more balanced narration of a European country and culture.

The need for such a balanced narration seems to be felt by the Chinese audience. Currently, some Chinese blogs provide alerts for people considering migration, warning TV viewers about the fakeness of the ‘reality’ narrated on TV. These blogs also address the difficulties involved in starting a business in Europe without a residence permit. ‘Chineseness’ alone, these bloggers argue, does not make everything possible.