Daily Times, Pakistan: INSIGHT: Controlling Chinese television
By David Moser
The system has become largely self-regulating. Ninety-nine per cent of
all censorship occurs with the writers and producers themselves. Sporadic
complaints and warnings from above enable them to develop an intuitive sense
for the boundaries of acceptable content. The lack of explicit guidelines
also keeps content more conservative than it need be, because producers tend
to err on the safe side The 2003 World Press Freedom report put out by the group Reporters
Without Borders ranks China 161st among 166 nations, somewhere between Iran
and North Korea. But Chinese television fare, at least, no longer consists
of the prudish melodramas and clumsy indoctrination programmes of the Maoist
past. Casual observers of today's freewheeling offerings of sex, crime,
drugs, violence, and banal game shows on Chinese TV might come away with the
impression that most of the shackles have been removed from televised
content. To be sure, this impression disappears if one focuses on explicit
political content. Viewpoints that deviate in the slightest from Party
doctrine are still absent from Chinese TV. Despite the surface diversity of
programming, the monolithic control of political discourse has changed
little since the 1950s. But the sheer volume of China's TV programming makes maintaining such
control difficult. China Central Television (CCTV) alone has 12 channels
(many broadcasting 24 hours a day), and employs about 3,000 people. CCTV
falls under the control of the Propaganda Department and the Ministry of
Radio, Film, and Television. Numerous provincial and municipal TV stations
are also required to carry some CCTV programming. This combination
represents a vast administrative undertaking. Given the staggering amount of
programming needed to fill the time slots, content monitoring must be
implemented with maximum efficiency. Censorship has been made easier, not more difficult, by the government's
decision in the 1990s to shift to a free-market strategy for entertainment
products. Big subsidies to TV stations were mostly discontinued, and the new
"sink or swim" approach forced TV outlets to compete for
advertising revenues, resulting in programming with greater mass appeal. Thus, in a strategy mirrored elsewhere in the cultural sphere, the
government simply relinquished much control over the moral component of TV
content. The anti-pornography saohuang campaigns carried out in the 1980s
and early 1990s are a thing of the past. Perhaps realising that an
entertained and distracted populace is less likely to complain about public
policy, the Party has allowed entertainment programming to follow the
Western model, lessening the need for micro-managed censorship. The result is a de facto separation between news and everything else.
This conveniently allows the authorities to control news programming with an
iron hand while relegating the bulk of programming to a looser and less
labour-intensive monitoring system. Of course, given China's highly
politicised atmosphere, politics can leak into even the most innocuous areas
of discourse, and the many talk shows and audience participation formats
necessitate a less intrusive but nonetheless effective system of content
regulation. The first surprise I encountered while working for CCTV as a programme
planner was how minimal this system is. Top-down directives and outright
censorship are rare. Few written guidelines outlining forbidden or sensitive
topics exist. No constant memoranda dictate content. Party officials don't
hover over each step of the process, and virtually no cutting of completed
products is carried out on Party orders. On the surface, writers, directors, and performers seem free to plan and
produce their shows with little or no supervision or monitoring. So how does
such a system block offending content? First and foremost, the system is largely reactive. The department heads
and oversight committees that meet to evaluate programming seldom dictate
content, but merely pass their complaints and recommendations down to
programming heads. The top-down hierarchy is autocratic and arbitrary; lower
levels have little collaborative input and no right of appeal. Serious
breaches can result in reprimands or dismissals. In effect, the system has become largely self-regulating. In my
experience, 99 per cent of all censorship occurs with the writers and
producers themselves. Sporadic complaints and warnings from above enable
them to develop an intuitive sense for the boundaries of acceptable content,
so they create shows that are free from offending material from the outset.
The lack of explicit guidelines also keeps content more conservative than it
need be, because producers tend to err on the safe side. Vague but pervasive intimidation is the main factor keeping TV personnel
in line. But another force serves the Party's interests as well: the
deep-seated Chinese cultural inertia that stresses collectivist,
group-oriented behaviour. In such an atmosphere, inclusion of politically
incorrect content is not merely a risky move, but constitutes a breach of
social decorum. Indeed, working daily with Chinese TV creators, I noticed a
subtle, almost instinctive tendency to avoid any content or format that is
unusual, novel, or unorthodox, never mind subversive. The exceptions to this state of affairs are when the Party initiates a
propaganda campaign, such as the one associated with the turnover of Hong
Kong in 1997, or the more recent anti-Falun Gong blitzkrieg. At such times,
directives are issued to produce programming with specific ideological
content, and such shows -- dubbed renwu (duties) -- are perfunctorily
overseen by TV producers, after which the more bottom-up mode returns. Many TV producers have internalised these controls so well that they are
an unconscious fact of life, and audiences now entertained by endless
costume dramas and soap operas are not clamouring for freer political
content. Barring some catastrophic change, this method of information
control can be expected to continue well into the 21st century. --DT-PS David Moser has taught translation and linguistics at the Beijing Foreign
Studies University, and is currently a programme advisor and English
consultant at CCTV in Beijing Source http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_8-8-2004_pg3_6
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