The Life-and-Death Struggle for Chinese Home Owners: At Least in a TV Drama

Guo Haiping (right) and Guo Haizao, sisters experiencing the struggles for owning a home, in the TV drama Wo Ju.

To own a home could be a matter of life and death for Chinese people. This is one of the messages a popular yet controversial TV drama tries to send.

"Wo Ju" (蜗居, meaning living like a snail in a small place), a 33-part series adopted from a novel of the same title, was one of the most popular TV dramas in China in 2009. The show tells stories of conspiracy between corrupt officials and real estate developers, the disparity between haves and have-nots in urban China, and the tough life people have to live in order to save or make money for buying a home, among other things--all very familiar to Chinese people.

In the drama, which is set in contemporary China in a fictional Shanghai-like city of Jiangzhou (江州), a low-income family even lost a life in a stand-off against the demolishing of their ghetto. The developer offered the family a brand new apartment for free, something these people could never dream of owning, in exchange for the family dropping the charge against the developer for killing a family member during demolishing.

"A life exchanging for a home," a government official in the show said of the incident. And yet, this official is behind the demolishing effort and devotes himself to using his political power to make way for property developments, and then shares with the developers the huge profits.

Besides plots that vividly depict today's social reality in China, the censorship rumor around the show made it even hotter. The rumor started when the rerun of the show on a Beijing television channel stopped abruptly after 10 episodes. Words then spread on the Internet that China’s governing body of broadcast media ordered the show off the air, on the ground of sexual content.

Viewers also noticed that the TV version of "Wo Ju" had 33 episodes, while the web and DVD versions had 35 episodes. Beijing News said in a story that Beijing TV cut two episodes' length of sexually explicit content before showing it.

Wang Lizhi, a university professor in Beijing, said the show went through the first round of broadcast across China but is not up for reruns like many other popular TV dramas. As Prof. Wang saw it, the issue with the show was not obscene content, but sharp language.

"Wo Ju" is known for its stinging comments that reflect the reality only too candidly. For example, one character told his wife that he took a usurious loan in order to make down payment for their new home. “The interest is only a little bit higher than bank loans,” he says, trying to calm down his furious wife. This comment implies that mortgage in China are having interests almost as high as usury.

In another scene, the wife of the low-income family complains: “We are all proletariat, all working people. There is neither lowliness nor nobleness among labor divisions, but why in a place like Jiangzhou some people live in garden villas…while we live in such a place [a city ghetto]? We are working honestly, too!”

"Such extreme language will influence social mood,” Prof. Wang said. When such expressions gain currency among people, they might encourage extreme actions. “It is better to use rationality. There is no benefit if people are emotional,” he said. For him, stopping reruns of the show was more of a stability consideration.

Despite the controversy, the series is still available on various websites.

News reports about the controversy:
http://news.xinhuanet.com/society/2009-12/12/content_12634070.htm

Watch the show:
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTI1NzAyMjYw.html

Related story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/05/business/global/05yuan.html

Entertainment Extravaganza and/or Propaganda Campaign: The Spring Festival Gala Show's Tough Job

Wang Fei performs at the CCTV Spring Festival Gala






The people, the party, the advertisers, all of them need to be pleased, and that’s the mission of the Spring Festival Gala show. By the eve of the Year of Tiger, the job for China Central Television (CCTV) has only gotten tougher.

For the past nearly three decades, watching the Spring Festival Gala show on CCTV has become a new custom of Chinese people’s lunar New Year celebration. The show is never pure performing arts, but always carries messages that the ruling party wants to convey to the people, which mostly promotes the legitimacy of the party. But in this year’s show, comparing with those in recent years, the propagandist intention seemed to be more blatant.

Particularly in those group song performances, by singers dressed up in minority outfits, or very old artists dubbed as teenagers, etc., political slogans have been turned into lyrics. A singer in Uyghur costume, for example, sang enthusiastically about the benefits of the newly established rural cooperative health care system. In reality, though, the system is facing all kinds of problems, and exactly how many rural residents are benefiting from it is worth questioning.

In another performance, a group of teenagers expressed loyalty to the party by singing: “without the communist party, there will be no new China”, and “following the community party, let’s build a great China.”

The first line has been the central theme of the party propaganda since the foundation of the People’s Republic, and has become such a cliché that very few young Chinese today would embrace it. But for the purpose of propaganda, sing it anyway. The second line is a relatively new invention, and more or less bears some nationalism sensation, which is gaining popularity among the Chinese youth. In one way or another, the party is trying to fortify its legitimacy in the minds of the entire nation by imposing the message on the performances, rather aggressively.

A show full of political preaching could only annul the intended political messages, of course. So for a better part of the entire gala show, entertainment is still the focus. Super star Wang Fei’s appearance certainly put this year’s show at a high point of China’s pop culture, while the reunion of Xiaohu Dui satisfied the nostalgia of China's rising middle-class: the generation born in the 1970s.

Meanwhile, putting together such entertainment extravaganza has become increasingly expensive, with ever fancier visual effects, better stage equipments, etc. CCTV therefore had to use the show to serve the advertisers, too. Unlike the Super Bowl broadcast in the U.S., CCTV’s five-hour airing of the gala was commercial free, which left the television station with few choice but to weave product promotion into performances. So actors wore aprons printed with the name of Lu Hua cooking oil, magician Liu Qian made a magic with Hui Yuan juice, and an actress in a short drama giving out Guo Jiao 1573, a famous liquor, as gifts.

Overall, it’s a tough job for the gala to appeal to everybody. After all the extravagance was over, however, people would keep talking about those entertaining or nostalgic moments, while forget those propagandist messages pretty quickly. Chances are, people would remember Guo Jiao 1573 better than the success of the rural health care system.

See more of the gala:
http://ent.sina.com.cn/f/v/2010cctvcw/index.shtml

Notes from China

traditional houses struggling to survive in a fast modernized city, Kunming

During my visit to China at the turn of the year, I had some interesting observations as well as experiences, and decided to document some of them.

Something New

The first time I finished a degree in the US and returned to China to find work, people in Beijing mostly showed admiration of my American education. I did get pretty good jobs and felt good of myself. That was in 2004. This time around, however, things were very different.

It seems like the ego of Chinese people has grown bigger over the years. They no longer look at people returning from overseas with high regard. On the contrary, they are more into reminding America-educated people that “not everything in the US is right.”

While visiting different cities and talking to different people, for a few times when I tried to comment situation in China by comparing with the US, I sensed resistance from the person I was talking to. So I started to avoid talking about America, unless I was asked about it, which also happened less frequently than five years ago. And frankly, to me, it was more interesting to hear people talking about what they were doing and what was happening in their life in China, than me telling them how things were in the States.

Something Unexpected

I have a few friends in Kunming who have been pretty well established: having decent jobs, getting promoted, and owning houses and cars. All in their thirties and college educated, they’re promising professionals: physician, court clerk, engineer, and accountant. Some of them work for government-related companies. They don’t deny that the single party ruling system has problems, but agree with each other that American-style democracy will not make things better in China.

“We all support the Communist Party,” they say. Millions of people who work directly or indirectly for the government feel the same way, they say. China is doing just fine, despite criticism from other countries, and they don’t want things to change too much.

What about human rights? What about corruption? Well, China is not perfect, they say, but neither is any country in the world. Besides, Chinese people are living a better life than people in many countries such as India or North Korea, in their view.

Having read a lot of news in western media, I’ve got the impression that China is full of crisis. But looking at and talking with people there made me realize that the CCP still has very strong appeal among Chinese people. Young professionals like my friends don’t like everything the party does, but certainly don’t want political overhaul in China.

After all, under the party’s rule, they have established their career, family and a good life. They don’t have that much demand for democracy, at least for now.

Something Impressive

two new houses built right next to each other, Xichuan

vendor-packed street in Xichuan

At least two things impressed me during this trip.

Supermarkets in Kunming, Yunnan no longer provide plastic bags for shoppers. People either have to purchase reusable bags, or bring their own. This is part of the effort pushed by the Kunming government to turn the city into an environment-friendly city. I’m impressed by the decisiveness and effectiveness of the government’s initiative.

Another thing impressed me was the chaos in a small town in Henan. Home to nearly 200,000 people, the rural town of Xichuan was a mess. Increasing number of cars packed in the streets, not stopping for pedestrians, not even for red lights. Everybody fought their way to move ahead, regardless of the traffic rules, as long as they didn’t kill each other. Multi-floor buildings were being built wherever they could set a foot on. They stood only an arm’s distance to each other, made already narrow allies even narrower, and turned the town into a dirt covered ghetto.

But what really impressed me was not the mess of this place, but its dynamics. Despite lack of order, this place was full of energy of growth. People were eager to make more money and enjoy better material life. More than once while I was walking in the streets, a door opened beside me and l saw a few women sitting in a narrow room weaving rugs, which was one of the newly developed business in the town. Stores of all kinds were everywhere, mostly individual owned. Many of them selling all kinds of household stuff for just 2 yuan each (30 US cents).

People were complaining about the chaos and the dirtiness, but continuing to do their business and make their living, full of enthusiasm, full of hope.

Something Astonishing

The sky-high real estate price in China is insane. In Beijing, everybody was telling me how housing price has doubled, tripled, or gone tenfold over the past decade. When I was working in Beijing in the early years of the 21st century, the price of 3000 yuan (US$440) per square meter sounded pretty high already. And today, one can barely find any property that’s below 10000 yuan (US$1470) per square meter.

I heard similar story in Chongqing and Kunming. Some people say there is huge bubble in China’s real estate market and the market will collapse some day, others believe the price could only go higher.

For people like me who are still studying overseas, such high housing price could well scare us away from returning to China to work after completing education. Like one lady recently returned to Beijing from the US told me: “a city like Beijing is no longer livable” because of the appalling real estate price.

Something Unchanged

a popular restaurant packed with eaters in Kunming

People. I mean, the amount of people. Having lived in the States for a few years, I have grown used to doing everything by myself: adding gas, filling out forms at the bank, throwing away trash when finish eating in a fast food restaurant. But in China, where there is always a labor surplus, there is always someone there to do things for me as a customer.

At the bank, despite the fact that I do read Chinese and understand how the number vending machine works, which is really simple, there is a clerk standing right beside the machine to press the button for me and hand me my waiting number. Similarly, in pretty much every fast food restaurant, McDonald’s included, there is someone collecting trash after a meal is finished.

It has always been like this, and I think it will continue to be this way. For better or for worse, average Chinese consumers receive more service on a daily basis than American consumers.

The Curious Case of Jay Chou

Jay Chou in The Curse of the Golden Flower


What's curious about Jay Chou (周杰伦), the Taiwanese pop icon, is his potential and actual impact on Chinese youth identity of being Chinese, their knowledge of and interest in traditional Chinese culture, and even his possible contribution to the Taiwan-Mainland tie.

At the first glance, Jay is certainly avant-garde, in a sense that he is very western. He keeps a very hip look, acts cool, sings in a unconventional way, and raps a lot. Deep down, he is more Chinese than many contemporary Chinese pop stars.

Unlike some other Hong Kong and Taiwan pop stars, such as Leehom Wang (王力宏) and Jacky Cheung (张学友), Jay doesn't really speak English, and talked in Chinese when being interviewed by CNN. Many of his most popular songs are the so-called "China style" (中国风) songs, featuring folk-song style music and lyrics full of ideas and lingo from ancient Chinese poems and classics, written by his pal Fang Wenshan. Jay once sang in a track that China style songs were his favorite. For an artist like Jay, the rich heritage of Chinese culture is simply too fertile to desert.

Ever since he starred in Zhang Yimou's costume movie, "The Curse of the Golden Flower," Jay seemed to be devoted even more to his China-style music making. He featured his image in the movie as the cover of one of his albums, tried to play Gu Qin in his music video, and picked up Peking Opera in his concerts. During his global tour in 2008, he applied many of these Chinese cultural elements to demonstrate to the world what is Chinese pop.

He seems to have a very strong sense of identity. In his early years as a pop star, the identity issue was mostly about who Jay Chou was. Lately, it has been more about what constitutes the Chineseness of a pop star.

In the Mainland, Jay's extensive use of traditional Chinese cultural symbols in his lyrics, instruments and music videos might revive the younger generations' interest in ancient Chinese culture. In Taiwan, his pop culture creation might help to forge the cultural tie between Taiwan and the Mainland. Jay himself perhaps never thought that one day, he could end up being the best teacher of traditional Chinese culture to millions of young people in the greater China region.