Formats, Cultural Security and China's Going out Policy

JDTV 8 (1) pp. 65–80 Intellect Limited 2017 International Journal of Digital Television Volume 8 Number 1 © 2017 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jdtv.8.1.65_1 MICHAEL KEANE1 AND JOY DANJING ZHANG Curtin University Formats, cultural security and China’s going out policy ABSTRACT KEYWORDS This article investigates the relationship between television formats, cultural secu- television formats rity and China’s ‘going out’ policy. Cultural security is a term used within Chinese Chinese television policy circles to advocate the strengthening of media and cultural pursuits with a cultural security view to making them effective instruments of national ‘soft power’, a term coined soft power by Joseph Nye (1990). Whereas ‘going out’ refers to Chinese business expansion going out internationally, in this article it describes media and cultural industries. We argue reality TV that these three elements constitute a new soft power coalition. Building on the existing demand, particularly among diasporic communities for historical dramas, 1. The author disclosed formatting of talent and reality shows allow Chinese cultural identity to be receipt of the following financial support reformed, remade, re-presented and modernized. The article provides background for the research, to the emergence of television formats, showing which kinds of programming authorship and/or passes both government scrutiny and the audience test. In the final section it looks publication of this article. Research at three examples of music talent shows, The Voice of China, I am a Singer, for this article was and Sing My Song that effectively function to reconnect domestic and diasporic funded through the Australian Research audiences. Council Discovery- Projects DP140101643 Willing Collaborators: Negotiating Change INTRODUCTION in East Asian Media Production. Since China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, the nation’s media has been on a heightened state of alert; at least that is the message emanating from the government. The government frequently cites ‘cultural security’ (wenhua anquan) as China’s strategy to resist cultural globalization. 65 4_JDTV_8.1_Keane Zhang_65-80.indd 65 3/24/17 11:41 AM Michael Keane | Joy Danjing Zhang 2. For more discussion of ‘Cultural security’ refers to the idea of strengthening and fortifying China’s Willing Collaborators, see special issue of media and cultural industries in order to build a stronger national founda- Media International tion: such fortification will allow China’s media and cultural enterprises to Australia, no 159 (2016). compete more successfully with foreign companies. Cultural security encour- ages China’s media industries to enter into collaboration with outsiders, the end result being transfers of ideas, skill and talent into China. In looking more closely at the industrial logic behind cultural security measures this article examines the relationship between television formats and China’s ‘going out’ (zou chuqu) policy, sometimes referred to as ‘going global’. It argues that know-how of formatting has transformed the landscape of Chinese television, allowing it to regionalize, most notably within the Asia-Pacific. In the process many formatted shows serve as a vehicle of ‘cultural soft power’, a term derived from Joseph Nye’s soft power concept (Nye 1990) but which in recent times has been re-versioned in China as ‘strong cultural power’ (wenhua qiangguo). Over the past few years ‘made-in-China’ formats have taken market share in regional markets. Yet these formats are not created in China. These are offspring, sometimes illegitimate, ‘second generation’ formats (Keane and Zhang 2016). The creative inspiration of foreign format producers is appropri- ated by more ‘risk averse’ Chinese media companies, echoing Jean Chalaby’s assertion that ‘The format industry rests on a compelling premise: the willing- ness of broadcasters to pay for the outsourcing of risk’ (2016: 12, original emphasis). Many ‘conceived abroad’ formats are now used to good advantage to revitalize Chinese media and to bring regional culture, celebrities, songwriters, performers and artists into China’s rapidly expanding media market, which in turn contributes to the professionalization of Chinese media. In doing so these ‘willing collaborators’2 contribute to the propagation of a ‘Mainland- inflected’ Chinese identity. The entry of imported formats in mainland China has been addressed by a number of studies in English over the past two decades (Keane 2002, 2002a, 2004; Keane et al. 2007; Fung and Zhang 2011; Zhang and Fung 2014; de Burgh et al. 2011). Other studies have examined elements of reality television and fandom; for instance, studies of Hunan Satellite TV’s Supergirls, itself a clone of Pop Idol (Meng 2009; Yang 2009; Huang 2014; Wu 2014) or Jiangsu Satellite’s If You Are the One (Kong 2013). More recently Lewis et al. have looked at reality-style television shows from the perspective of educating people about modern lifestyle choices (Lewis et al. 2012, 2016) Formats have already made Chinese television more contemporary, more entertaining and more diverse, shifting the emphasis from serialized re-enactments of history featuring massive sets, casts of thousands and designated villains, towards unscripted television with amateur performers. Because of their success, entertainment shows have generated predictable critical commentary from elite scholars, pundits and political conservatives. Such formats mediate between the sacredness of traditional culture, inher- ent in enactments of history, and the ‘profanity’ of popular culture (Groys 2014), the latter a composite of global, East Asian and Chinese vernacular culture. We begin our investigation with a brief overview of the Chinese television system as it is today, noting the Chinese government’s obsession with exporting its culture, in this case television programmes. Nothing could be more resolute than the state’s desire to elevate its global cultural presence 66 International Journal of Digital Television www.intellectbooks.com 67 4_JDTV_8.1_Keane Zhang_65-80.indd 66 3/24/17 11:41 AM Formats, cultural security and China’s going out policy (see Li W. 2016; Li H. 2016). Since 2007, when President Hu Jintao launched a soft power crusade, an inordinate amount of money, reportedly somewhere between US$7–10 billion, has been allocated to facilitate Chinese culture to ‘go out’ (zou chuqu) (Shambaugh 2013; Keane 2015). This ‘going out’ is intended to challenge the flow of foreign content ‘coming in’, effectively main- taining China’s cultural security (wenhua anquan). Importantly from a political perspective, as Wanning Sun (2015) notes, it is meant to disseminate positive messages of China, and by doing so assist Chinese media (and culture) to be more competitive on the global stage. However, as this article will show, because the language of broadcast is mandarin Chinese, the substantive audience is the Chinese Diaspora. In effect, this represents a partial manifestation of cultural soft power; that is, this content effectively ‘reconnects’ with people of Chinese heritage living overseas – in many cases an audience yearning for cultural maintenance – rather than ‘connecting’ with the so-called ‘foreign’ (laowai) viewer. In showing the persistence of international media ‘coming in’, the next section illustrates how foreign formats have entered the highly protected market, precipitating a ‘format fever’, and how in late 2013 the Chinese media regulator, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (hereafter SAPPRFT) moved to implement restrictions on the number of formats that could be imported. As a result of this restriction many buyers looked to South Korea, which had begun to pitch new content and ideas to the Chinese market. The Koreans, already making cultural inroads into China through the Korean Wave (Jin 2016; Yecies et al. 2011), saw this as a great opportunity. As we show, however, national security is linked to cultural security: in July 2016, the Chinese government issued threats to ban Korean media and celebrities in response to South Korea’s military engage- ment with the United States (Frater 2016). The third section introduces several international formats that have made the transition into China and discusses which genres work in China, noting how winner-take-all formats have generally failed the ‘cultural test’, while those emphasizing family, and family values, have appeased the regulators and won over the market. Returning to the theme of soft power, the final section looks briefly at how the Chinese industry has used formatting to expand its global and regional presence, in the process reconnecting (Keane 2016) with estranged overseas audiences. A point we wish to emphasize is that China’s international reputation as a locus of Asian pop culture (Chua 2012) is enhanced by the inflow of ideas from East Asia, with many creative teams now moving to the Mainland. We choose three examples to illustrate this phenomenon of reconnecting: The Voice of China (Netherlands), I am a Singer (South Korea) and Zhongguo hao gequ (Sing My Song) (China). The key point we wish to emphasize is that such formats appeal to the audience because they are essentially pan-Asian; they utilize participants from Greater China to create an impression of a creative China, an idea that in years past would have seemed oxymoronic. The difference with Sing My Song, however, is that it is a created-in-China format, spun off from the Voice of China. CHANGE AND CONTINUITY IN CHINESE TELEVISION Before turning to some notable examples of imported formats it is worth considering characteristics of the media environment in which they have 66 International Journal of Digital Television www.intellectbooks.com 67 4_JDTV_8.1_Keane Zhang_65-80.indd 67 3/24/17 11:41 AM Michael Keane | Joy Danjing Zhang taken root. It is undeniable that the Chinese television industry is at a cross- roads. Despite efforts by the Party-state and its various regulatory institu- tions to manage content, global transformations in production, distribution and viewing have impacted on the world’s largest media marketplace.

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