CHINESE TV EXEC KEEPS ‘EM LAUGHING AT AFI FEST

“Our biggest problem is the programs are not so lively; their pace is too slow,” the network television executive explained. “We’re trying more improvement on that.”

No, that wasn’t the president of ABC lamenting his third-place position in the prime-time ratings.

The speaker was Chen Hanyuan, deputy director of China Central Television, the state-run national broadcast network of the People’s Republic. Chen is the second in command of a network with the potential to dwarf every other TV broadcaster in the world.

In a country with just 56 million TV sets, he said, the national network already boasts an audience of 200 million people. That’s just one-fifth of the population.

Chen turned out to be the main attraction Thursday night at the opening of the National Video Festival at the Hollywood campus of the American Film Institute. He was there as part of the festival’s highlighting of programs from China. By the end of the evening, the slightly built, 50-year-old broadcaster’s enigmatic metaphors had the audience applauding and laughing with every other comment.

Question from the floor: “What criteria does his network have for selecting programs?”

Answer: “Many countries have problems with environmental pollution. We don’t want to bring any pollution to our spirits as well. In the old days, we used to drive with our windows shut. Now we drive with them open. If a few flies come in, that’s all right. I and my colleagues have fly swatters.”

Throughout the evening and an earlier interview, Chen’s comments--including his gingerly criticism of China during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution--left ample room for interpretation.

But Chen’s primary theme was nonetheless quite clear: Television in Deng Xiaoping’s China isn’t a vehicle of overt propaganda; nor is it a tool to directly control the people.

Like his counterparts in American commercial TV, Chen sees the medium principally as a source of light, diverting entertainment that gently nudges, rather than pushes, people toward a nationwide social and political consensus.

“Our purpose,” Chen said through an interpreter, “is to provide some healthy entertainment for the large masses of people and to increase all sorts of knowledge, to perform a service for them. With the various kinds of programs we offer, we hope to raise the moral level of the people, to increase the level of awareness that society is a large group of people. Everyone is serving everyone else.”

“Younger people especially should be made aware that our society has gone through a great deal, that there has been a lot of unpleasantness in the past. We want to continue the desire to build up the country.”

UCLA professor Nick Browne agreed. He compiled the video festival’s 50-minute program of selections from China’s national television.

Browne said in a separate interview that the medium in post-Mao China is marked by its almost total lack of programs with overt political themes. There is, however, an obvious desire to present wholesome, morally uplifting, family-oriented shows, Browne said.

One of the few American programs to air on Chinese TV, for example, was “Little House on the Prairie.”

Under Mao, Browne said, “Chinese television consisted ad nauseum of programs with themes like eradicating capitalist roaders. People got unbelieveably disgusted and sick of it. . . .

“The whole question of the status of ideology and art has been inflected by contemporary distaste for the role of ideology during the Cultural Revolution. (Television) is not obviously a vehicle for party propaganda or doctrine. The social role of Chinese television is to help to forge the identity of China as a modern nation.”

Browne’s anthology of China’s programming ranged from family melodramas, to a popular British-made English teaching series, to stand-up comedy, to the obviously nationalistic coverage of 1984’s 35th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic.

Especially revealing, however, was the evening national news program, which Chen said was the most popular show on his network. The half-hour national news is broadcast at the dinner hour. Fifteen-minute news programs are broadcast at midday and late at night.

The evening news show opened with rather elaborate graphics but then settled into a rather tight format of the news reader delivering voice overs to videotaped reports. There were no on-air correspondents.

The lead story on the evening show was a progress report on a new economic development zone, followed by the unveiling of a statue honoring women and the visit of Ford Motors executives wanting to collaborate on the building of a new automobile plant.

Foreign news--which is provided by the New China News Agency, UPI Television News, Europe’s Visnews service and the Asian Broadcasting Union--consisted of a report on Chilean police killing three Communist Party members during a funeral, a prison revolt in Thailand and the landing in California of the American Space Shuttle.

While American news producers might question the selection of stories, on the air there appeared little in the way of a heavy-handed and direct party influence on the news program. Still, the influence was there. And it was not so very subtle.

“The People’s Republic of China is under the guidance and leadership of the Chinese Communist Party,” said Chen. “There are two aspects to the domestic policy. One is to increase the economy and to stimulate more contact with other countries. Two is to oppose hegemony and support world peace.

“Everyone in the television world has to support these ideas. If someone is really opposed to these things, he would be very unhappy in our group. He could leave.”

One could argue that commercial TV in the United States serves its ideological and financial masters in a similar manner. There is virtually nothing on American commercial TV that questions the basic assumptions of free enterprise or liberal democracy. Said UCLA’s Browne: “American TV is a pretty monolithic ideological culture. Such differences that exist are reconcilable through the marketplace.”

Chinese television, too, is evolving a marketplace component. The country allows 15 minutes a day of on-air advertising. Although most of the commercials are allotted to Chinese state-run firms, American and other foreign countries’ products are increasingly seen on TV.

Chen was adamant, however, that encroaching commercialism should not interfere with the programming. He was especially insistent that news programs should carry no advertising at all. After his first look at American TV, that was his principal criticism of the network news shows.

“In America they insert quite a few advertisements,” Chen said. “I watch a news report and before I’ve got it straight, there’s an advertisement for detergent.

“In America it looks like it’s not a question of inserting advertisements in the news broadcast; it’s inserting the news broadcast among the advertisements.”