10
Television, Culture, and Politics

The electronic amplification of contradiction

China's motherland stretches from the vast Manchurian plains to the steep mountains of Tibet, from the foreboding Mongolian desert to tropical Hainan Island. The land itself has changed very little through the ages. Her political authority has likewise persisted. Beginning with the absolutist dictates of Qin Shi Huang, China's first feudal emperor, the idea of a supreme authority — one who stands above the people and guides them to their destiny — has been a fundamental trait of Chinese society. While forms of government ranging from the extreme right to the extreme left have ruled the country, Chinese people have always placed their trust in this notion of a central authority, personified by a national leader, to whom they are fiercely loyal. Cast in terms of unity of purpose and of total devotion to ideological principles, one need not go back further in history than the Cultural Revolution to see clearly the lengths to which this passionate faith can be taken and the consequences it can bring. But today history may be catching up with itself. Perhaps more than anything else, the resistance movement in China, with its twin emphases of freedom and democracy, has strongly challenged the tradition of autocratic rule. It could not have happened without television.

Television, of course, is itself an authoritarian institution of sorts, one that articulates confidently and widely. Critics in societies all over the world complain that the medium has the power to serve the political and economic interests of its owners and managers by creating a narrow agenda and monopolizing public opinion, that it debases culture, and that it nearly mesmerizes viewers psychologically. Precisely because it is so influential, television seems to be the perfect communications medium for the perpetuation of autocratic rule in a restrictive environment such as China. Certainly the perceived potential for doing so encouraged officials in Beijing to develop the television system as a mechanism to promote national modernization. But despite their intentions, a 'single leader, single voice' complementarity of communist politics and modern communications technology, wherein official mandates are diffused efficiently and unproblematically through the electronic wizardry of television, has not taken place. Lightning-fast and ultimately uncontrollable, television has instead given rise to a diversity of cultural and political sentiments in China at a speed that disrupts stability and control. Furthermore, the often conflicting perspectives that television articulates do not simply stand alongside one another in the popular consciousness, unanalyzed and uncriticized by viewers. Television exaggerates and intensifies each stream of information in the ideological flood that it cumulatively delivers to its audiences, producing an electronic amplification of contradiction that has dramatically altered the nation's cultural and political contours.

Since 1979 China has desperately tried to develop its economy while at the same time promising to repair its internal political difficulties, especially the widespread corruption, and to modernize technologically while judiciously expanding its cultural horizons. The immense magnitude and ill-defined nature of such an undertaking has led to the formulation of policies and practices that are often in conflict with one another, creating a kind of national schizophrenia. As Orville Schell noted two years before the blowup in Beijing in 1989, 'On the one hand [China] continues to protest against despoilers of its socialist revolution, while on the other hand it promotes crypto-capitalism. The country often appears to be going in opposite directions at the same time' (Schell, 1987: 13-14). It is exactly contradictions such as this, manifest not only in economic policy but in virtually all aspects of life — highlighted, legitimated, and popularized by television — that have stimulated alternative, competing visions of China's collective future and the personal dreams of millions of Chinese citizens.

This is not what Deng Xiaoping had in mind in 1979. Above all else, the Chinese government has tried to act as a unified body. According to the principle of democratic centralism, Deng (the de facto supreme leader until death), as well as the general secretary of the Communist Party, the premier, and the politburo are supposed to demonstrate unity and soli darity by acting in full agreement. National objectives, as decided by the top leadership, are to be carried out at all levels within the society — a charge that is to be facilitated in part by television. There is, therefore, a chain of agents of authority designed to promote unity: the nation (including especially its history and many cultural traditions), the supreme ruler, the Communist Party, the current government, and, with its own type of influence owing mainly to technological capabilities, television. Through the years the people have deeply respected their own history and culture, have supported the Communist Party as their liberator from the wretched realities of feudalism and the social divisiveness of nationalism, have put their faith in charismatic political leaders, and have accepted the government as administrator of the socialist agenda. At first, television was an impressive addition to the history and character of Chinese political authority, its very presence testifying to the improved standard of living of the early 1980s, its attractiveness making it a domestic necessity, its efficiency promoting it as an unsurpassed instrument for the dissemination of information.

The unity ground to a halt late in the last decade. When the economy took a dramatic downward turn, the people strongly criticized the govern ment's utopian visions as unrealistic while they still clung to their own dreams:

The fundamental economic contradiction — a fast-developing class difference in a society that promises and promotes equality, but does not provide equal opportunity for financial success, produced extreme negative reactions from those who felt they were losing ground. Many of the brightest and most ambitious young men and women realized that the promise of the clay rice bowl was an apparition. Economic restructuring had come to a standstill. The old system would continue to prevent them from ever utilizing their potential, while other people — private unit merchants often engaged in less demanding work — would still benefit from the partial, undemocratic restructuring. The dilemma was magnified by television. Commercials and imported films and dramas celebrated the individualism and materialism of a consumer society at the very time the people could not break out of their monotonous routines or prosper from their own initiative. Industrial news and commercials expressed and intensified the economic class differences. Even the rich were not satisfied with the range of consumer choices available to them in China or with their lockout from participation in political life.

The people began to realize that other political and economic systems function far better than their own and that their personal freedoms are few. The moralizing and sacrificing lifestyle that is demanded of the citizenry was widely known not to be practiced even by high-ranking communist officials. The economic crisis of the late 1980s served to increase reliance on guanxi wang, leading to even more corruption, years after the government promised to reduce or eliminate the problem, In the name of solving the financial crisis, the Communist Party strongly reasserted its political authority. In fall 1989, Jiang Zemin promised 'no total Westernization' of China and Li Peng called for greater political control of ideology and the economy. Yet, at the same time, many television programs and commercials kept serving up concrete alternatives to the tiresome political rhetoric and the hard reality of everyday life.

The most fundamental contradictions in China, then, are glaring disparities within the idealized, unified voice of the Communist Party that was first raised by Mao Zedong as he shouted into the public address microphone at Tiananmen Gate in 1949, alternative realities that are made known primarily by television, and the worsening state of everyday life. Coming to realize the discrepancies, contradictions, and broken promises, the people not only feel frustrated; they feel betrayed. The shift in their thinking has been fundamentally influenced by television which has acted like a two-edged sword piercing the armor of the Communist Party. Some television programming has sparked deep criticism and the imagination of a better life, while the doctrinaire and strident propaganda that appears on the very same channels has, for many viewers in the cities especially, crystallized resistance and undercut cultural and political hegemony in the process.

Political Television, Polysemy, and the Demise of the Mass Audience

In order to further understand how television has decisively stimulated the revolutionary change of consciousness taking place in China, we must consider specific institutional practices of the medium, the programming that is transmitted by the television system, and the particular ways that Chinese TV viewers interpret and use this symbolic material. To begin with, it is a mistake to try to determine what 'the government' or 'the system' is doing in China. Doing so presumes a singularity of purpose and an administrative efficiency that simply does not exist. Although in principle television should reflect and advocate a coherent political philosophy and suggest conforming social practices, what we find instead at all three analytical domains mentioned above — the institution of television, the programs it transmits, and audience activity — is diversity and contradiction. What I will now argue is that, first of all, the Chinese television system articulates a multiplicity of competing cultural and political visions that is the product of the carrying out of workplace routines by media professionals. Second, television programs, even when they are produced and selected under tightly-controlled circumstances, are not semantically homogenous. Finally, viewers frequently interpret and use television symbolism in a manner that is not intended by the government. What makes these variations and divergences so significant in China is that they occur in circumstances where ideological unity and social conformity are promoted as keys to national stability, and where they are essential to the maintenance of political power by the Communist Party. Television makes it impossible for the government successfully to promote but one cultural or political system. The Chinese people no longer know or care what is ru (the official culture: see p. 153). The unchallengeable authority of the Communist Party has been strongly challenged.

Television as a cultural and political forum

The diversity that inheres in the program content of American television has prompted the authors cited above, Horace Newcomb and Paul Hirsch, to regard television as a 'cultural forum.' The 'multiplicity of meanings' that are enabled within the electronic encoding does not result from design or from regulation. Nor do all ideas and visions have an equal chance to be represented on the system. Sponsors, station owners, and program managers all wield disproportionate influence in the selection of imagery that appears on television in capitalist countries. Still, even within a structure of economic and ideological supervision, diversity in the overall content of what television presents as a system is inescapable. It results from the cumulative work produced by media professionals who each have their own values, experiences, perspectives, and ways of expressing ideas. Inevitably, in one way or other, the multiple views and visions of people who comprise the television workforce become incorporated into the programs that are generated within the television system.

Naturally, we must be careful when we draw parallels in the practices of television professionals who labor under circumstances where the television systems, political systems, and cultures differ as much as they do between the United States and China. But the principle of television as a cultural forum certainly applies in China. Just as the institutional organizations and production processes of the television industry in the United States act to prevent the medium from serving only its controllers, the men and women who occupy the offices, studios, newsrooms, editing booths, and every other quarter of the Chinese television industry represent a heterogeneity that has led to a diversity in what that system transmits too. These media specialists make the day-to-day decisions that introduce, emphasize, interpret, shade, and downplay the content of television. Their decisions are often self-consciously political and reflect the oppositional sentiment that has grown so precipitously in the cities since the mid 1980s. Artistic and journalistic freedoms in China are subtly and cumulatively won and originate within the ranks of the nation's media specialists. In fact, many ideological twists and turns that have come from the national government itself for the past several years in China have been influenced by nuances originating with workers in television and the other mass media who have dared to author unofficial ideas, accounts, and explanations. By invoking the government's own rhetoric and rationale of openness and reform, China's change agents in the media often have actually been able to do their oppositional work in the guise of sanctioned national interest.

The likelihood that diverse views, some of them quite subversive, can find their way onto the airwaves in China is further increased by the inability of the bureaucracy to manage state ideology well. This was the case most remarkably in the controversial airing of New Star and River Elegy — cultural and political events in China that further reveal the unique and compelling role of television as a communications medium, and the television series as a storytelling format, as interacting ideological fields of force. These television series articulated the Chinese 'subject in crisis,' stimulating all kinds of people throughout the broad and diverse nation to commune emotionally in repeated, ritualistic experiences of political resistance. Ideological contrasts are also reflected in the incredible contradictions that exist between the blatant materialism and individualism that are allowed to be promoted on television and the content of other program ming that advocates traditional socialist values. Also, the desire of TV station officials to attract large audiences has encouraged them to take the interests and desires of their viewers more into account in recent years, creating another institutional shift of emphasis away from the sanctity and uniformity of official positions. Furthermore, the rapidly-expanding size of the television system in China, wherein more and more channels are added, each of which requires programs to fill airtime, likewise contributes to the diversity.

These specific conditions — multiple visions and intentions held by employees at every level within the TV industry, an inefficient and confused bureaucracy that cannot manage or control, contradictory values expressed in programs and commercials, a trend toward trying to attract and please larger audiences, and the appetite of a growing television system, have all made the medium a potent 'cultural and political forum' in China. In fact, the government finally admitted during the stressful summer in 1989 that it had lost control of its own media, that the plethora of perspectives had assumed a dangerous life of its own.

Some steps have been taken to exercise greater control over television content since the period of martial law in 1989. Two of CCTV's most popular personalities — prime-time news anchorwoman Du Xian and anchorman Xue Fei — have been reassigned to non on-air positions after they dressed in black and tearfully read the news on the night of June 4th. By late 1990, the term 'comrade' (tongzhimen) was once again being used by the newscasters to address their audiences. The government also tried to use television to directly counteract the influence of the TV program that is commonly thought to have contributed greatly to the unrest — River Elegy. In the wake of the 1989 military crackdown, CCTV produced a series of short programs titled One Hundred Mistakes of River Elegy. Each installment was designed to refute one major historical claim or cultural criticism that had been made in the original production. River Elegy was popular and controversial precisely because it dared to dishonor Chinese culture. Like New Star, it stood out conspicuously on the TV system, influencing viewers in ways that thousands of hours of propagandistic television programs could never do. The remedial program, One Hundred Mistakes of River Elegy, may have actually extended the influence of the original by calling attention to River Elegy once again. It also confused viewers. The perplexity was perhaps best articulated by the young daughter of one of my narrators in 1989, when she said: 'Daddy, how come River Elegy was 100 percent right before June 4th, and 100 percent wrong after?' The bewilderment was exacerbated by the spate of commercials which often appeared immediately after an episode of the corrective program, advocating behavior that directly conflicts with the moral lessons that had just been given. Contradictory juxtapositions of imagery such as this are commonplace on Chinese television contributing to its role as a cultural and political forum.

Television's messages and meanings

Even in the most controlled television systems, programs can never foster a single understanding or response on the part of the audience. How viewers interpret television's messages do not simply reflect the aims of the producers, and the apparent implications of programs do not necessarily reveal the meanings that audiences take away from viewing. Television programs do not have a single meaning, connotation, or objectively definable significance. Television's images are, instead, polysemic (Fiske, 1987). They are pregnant with meanings. More specifically, programs are repositories of potential interpretations that are actualized in viewers' varying involvements with them. This is not to say that TV programs are completely open texts that encourage limitless or wholly unguided interpretations. We must be careful not to overstate or romanticize the role of the viewer in the reception and use of television content. The specific images, framing, format, the internal structure of any specific program, and the program's relation to other symbolic material on the medium, all help establish cues for preferred 'readings' by audiences (Hall, 1980). And, of course, the assumptive worlds that television programs present — the implicit, sub textual content, not just the obvious messages —also, even subconsciously, suggest and prefer certain audience responses.

Certainly television does have its intended effects, in some ways, for some of the audience, some of the time. Nonetheless, even in cases where program producers are clear in their own minds about what a program should say, they cannot, ultimately, control the way audiences will respond to their creations. Even the most seemingly uncomplicated attempts to 'transfer meaning' greatly oversimplify the nature of viewers' negotiations with television. This has certainly been the case in China. Recall my earlier example, for instance, of news viewers who pay more attention to the street scenes from foreign cities than to the political messages which accompany the visuals. The main message that many viewers got from Follow Me, the English language lesson TV program, was not improved language skills, but instead a deep appreciation, even love, for the Westerner who hosted the program, Britain's Kathy Flowers. Or, consider once again how viewers came away from watching Oshin with the strong feeling that the lead character's success was made possible not only because she worked hard, but because of the freedom she enjoyed in the conduct of her private business. Television's messages, then, can never impose a single meaning, or produce only the intended effects, no matter how carefully constructed or seemingly one-sided they are. The polysemy of television imagery overrules any possibility that the interpretation of programming can be managed by authority.

Polysemy does not simply open up the possibility of subversive, alternative readings, however. One of the most memorable images to ever appear on Chinese television, and on TV all over the world, is the famous video footage of the lone man standing in front of a line of tanks moving along Jianguomenwai Avenue near the Beijing Hotel. This image has been widely celebrated outside China as the definitive representation of defiance and courage — the personification of resistance to political and military repression. George Bush praised the man in one of his speeches. It appeared on the cover of magazines and on the front page of newspapers everywhere. In the West, the video footage was played again and again as we marvelled at the courage of the man — so vulnerable and gallant —standing before the intimidating tanks just hours after the massacre on the streets near Tiananmen Square.

The very same video footage was played many times in propaganda programs on Chinese television too. But the propagandists framed the famous incident quite differently, as the narration reveals: 'If the soldiers had not exercised restraint, how could this man, hailed as a hero by some Western media, have been able to show off in front of these tanks?' For advocates of the military measures that were taken to 'restore order to the capital' in China, the exact same image that to some viewers symbolized bravery in the face of violent military repression, was used as evidence to argue that the military 'acted with full restraint.'

Chinese television viewers saw this footage in programs that featured other forms of disobedience such as the images I discussed in the last chapter. Viewers saw hundreds of young Chinese men and women throwing rocks and sticks at military vehicles, apparently attacking and beating the drivers, torching some of the vehicles with the men still inside, and so on. Despite the gravity of their surfaces, all these images are richly polysemic. Television does many things at the same time; propaganda and resistance can spring simultaneously from precisely the same source. It is not predetermined, for instance, how protestors throwing rocks at passing military vehicles will be interpreted: heroic or irresponsible, though the narrator tries to frame the response according to the latter. Furthermore, how viewers come to interpret messages such as these are influenced greatly by the economic, political, and cultural conditions that impinge upon their lifeworlds — the macrosocial factors — which by spring of 1989 had become intolerable. But semiotic negotiations that take place between viewers and programs must also be considered in relation to the interpretive work of audience members who occupy individualized contexts — their microsocial worlds.

The Chinese TV audience at work

While the government tries to use television to unify China, in the cities, at least, just the opposite has happened. The Chinese audience is not a mass. It does not respond to television in a uniform way. Viewers interact with television's symbols and semiotic structures to create their own meanings, promote their own understandings, and develop their own ideological coalitions. Though television surely has the ability to influence viewers in ways that benefit its controllers, the role of the viewer as an agent in the construction of his or her own experience with the medium should not be underestimated.

The political contexts of many communist countries (past and present) throughout the world have stimulated television viewers in those nations to become masters of interpretation, reading between the lines in order to pick up the less obvious messages. This was common in Eastern Europe, for instance, and it has certainly been the case in China. Many of my narrators describe not only what they watch, but how they watch television. Because viewers know that the government often bends and exaggerates

37 The famous polysemic image, featured in Newsweek magazine and on CCTV.

its reports, they become skilled at imagining the true situation. What is presented, what is left out, what is given priority, how things are said —all these modes are noticed and interpreted sensitively. Changes in consciousness brought on by television in China, therefore, are stimulated not just by exposure to new information and ideas, but by the inventive ways that viewers critically interpret and use TV's symbolic content. The often taken-for-granted activity, 'watching television,' signifies something in China that is very different from that to which most of us are accustomed.

Certain basic characteristics of Chinese culture and communication invite distinctive interpretive practices. It begins with language. The people must listen very attentively in spoken interaction and read print messages carefully and creatively in order to decode messages. In spoken Chinese, for instance, each sound can be expressed in four tones: flat, ascending, descending, and a combination of ascending and descending. The meaning of the utterance depends greatly on the inflection, so listeners become very good at carefully picking up the most subtle shifts of emphasis. Written Chinese characters likewise require skill in interpretation as they are individually far less denotative than are the basic symbols of other language groups. The characters are uniquely meaningful in relation to the linguistic structure in which they are embedded, a circumstance that requires the reader 'correctly' to infer the meaning from the associations of the characters, a challenging and imprecise activity. Hence, Chinese language is more 'aesthetic' — metaphorical and poetic — than it is 'efficient,' in the purely functional sense of the word. Because the language is so inexact in this way, it encourages playful articulations and interpretations, which, in a repressive political environment, enhances the opportunity for communicat ing subversive messages. Nonverbal forms of communication — gestures, body movement, facial expressions, paralanguage — are also extremely subtle and sensitively read in Chinese culture. These intricate communications are not limited to unmediated interpersonal exchanges. An unac knowledged, strategic coordination between sources of public messages in China — the journalists, TV producers, and filmmakers, for instance — and the audience, makes it possible to represent unofficial commentaries and views in the Chinese media. In this way, the television system has been appropriated by the people for purposes of resistance to the very authority which, theoretically, controls them.

Chinese people also readily deconstruct institutional pronouncements by means of their alert and ambitious involvement with television. The country's depressed economic status, its broadening culture, and the stinging political turmoil all encourage critical interpretations of the public face and voice of government. I have identified several domains of these interpretations already — disbelief of news items, hatred of the government's constant self-promotion, mocking of the 'model worker' programs, disgust with misleading commercials, and so on. The turmoil in 1989 has sharpened critical viewing even more. A Beijing viewer, for instance, points out that propagandists have routinely used television to claim that the People's Congress, China's quasi-democratic body of national lawmakers, has real authority to represent the people. This was one of the most debated issues during the turmoil in 1989 when it became painfully clear to nearly every one that the People's Congress in fact does not adequately represent the people. The propaganda nonetheless kept flowing, becoming a highly salient and thoroughly rejected message for many viewers who may not have thought much about the issue before. This is but one example of how television can undermine rather than sustain the government's objectives when the people know that the information contained in an official message is false.

Audiences for television are not constituted solely in acts of watching programs. 'The audience' is also formed at times when television's symbolic agenda is recognized, reconstructed, and transformed in the routine discourses of viewers' everyday lives. Political sentiments often develop more clearly and firmly in these moments of social interpretation — ideological editing that takes place in the minds of viewers as they talk about and reflect further upon what they see on TV. The power of New Star and River Elegy, for example, derived not just from their presence on television or from the immediate impressions and interpretations of viewers, but also from how the programs stimulated political discussion and provided a common referent for the construction of everyday social interaction. In an environment like China, this type of public dialogue confirms individual viewers' political sentiments and socially validates their feelings through the formation of constituencies of resistance. But television's agenda is reproduced, reconstructed, and transformed even in the most routine talk about programs in any political environment. The medium is a resource that, because of its sweeping presence, appeal, and social utility, expands an ideological agenda in a way that no other form of communication can, sometimes in accord with the intentions of its controllers, sometimes not. As we have seen, this is by no means an entirely imposed or predictable process. The ideological consequences of television rest as much with the audience as they do with the producers and presenters of programs.

China Turned on

When students and workers took to the streets of Beijing in 1989, the government self-righteously disparaged them as 'counterrevolutionaries' —enemies of the people. This loaded term is habitually invoked to promote the idea that the government still spearheads a heroic communist revolution against the evils that confronted China before 1949 and continue to threaten her stability and progress today. In truth, of course, the real revolution in China now is a struggle against the 'revolutionary' government that 40 years after its founding has become far more a force of repression than of liberation. Resistance to totalitarian rule in China is not simply a cry for change in the political structure or a desperate reaction to a faltering economy. More than anything else, what the people want is freedom — of the press, of personal expression, to choose and change jobs, to travel, to chart one's own destiny. While these issues have political and economic origins and consequences, they are profoundly cultural matters. Modifications in the cultural identities and visions of China's urban population have interacted with economic realities and perceived political possibilities to provoke widespread discontent. Television is the eye of the cultural storm, its presence influencing the future of China in ways that no other technology or human agency can.