It's not only America Raymond. Look what is happening in one of the last bastions of socialism, China.
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Band Hits Sour Note in China
Group's Appeal Shows Rift Between Culture, Party
Young Chinese girls scream in excitement upon seeing the boy rock band (Yong He - Imaginechina)
By John Pomfret
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, June 10, 2002; Page A01
SHANGHAI -- Sky Wang joined thousands of women and girls on a recent Saturday to mob four stars from Taiwan whose boy band and soap opera have taken China by storm. The coltish 20-year-old advertising agency employee rose at 5 a.m. to greet the rockers as they arrived at a Shanghai airport. Screaming and singing in a day-long pursuit of her idols in the F4 group, she returned home at 2:00 the next morning, after staking out their hotel for a final glimpse.
Along the way, Wang recalled, she went "totally crazy" several times, saw frenzied fans crush a live rabbit brought as a present for one of the stars, touched her favorite singer and -- her big triumph -- succeeded in tossing him a pair of sunglasses. "Blue lenses," she recounted. "So cool. It's his favorite."
Wang's frenzy over F4 may be little more than a spring fling with the latest fad, as fleeting and innocent in Shanghai as anywhere. But it is also part of a new contest for power in China. The explosion of F4's popularity among young people in a space of several months ignited a commercial battle for profits, challenged the authority of government censors, revealed the breadth of a black market in popular culture, set agencies of the Communist Party against each other and led authorities to call out 5,000 riot police -- all before the group sang a single note on Chinese soil.
Like never before in China's history, the phenomenon showed, commercial interests and popular demand are competing directly with party orthodoxy -- and increasingly bending the party to their will. Although popular music around the world often has taken on the established order, here the battles rage within the Communist Party itself as well. Some parts of the ruling machinery try to harness the market to produce booming profits -- government policy for the last two decades -- while other parts attempt vainly to maintain ideological and cultural control, fearing power could slip from their hands.
Later this year, China will install a new party leadership, the largest political transformation since the government reorganization that followed the Tiananmen Square crackdown 13 years ago. But a deeper transformation is already underway, changing the way power works here and remaking the political, economic, social and cultural landscape of this massive country.
This story is the first of an occasional series on how power works and is wielded in the new China.
An Instant Hit
Angie Chai, a chain-smoking, gravelly voiced Taiwanese television producer, had an idea early last year. Famed for her variety shows on Taiwanese TV, Chai wanted to create a soap opera to showcase good-looking boys. "All over Taiwan, all over Asia, all over the world, girls are desperate for love," Chai mused recently in her cramped office in downtown Taipei. "I decided we could fulfill their dreams."
Borrowing her story line from a saccharine Japanese cartoon strip called "Boys Are Prettier Than Flowers," Chai set out to find four boy-toys to play the roles of spoiled rich kids in a kind of "Baywatch" meets "Archie and Jughead" meets "Beverly Hills 90210." One, Ken Zhu, she found as he waited tables. Another, Sky Wang's favorite, Jerry Yen, she got through a modeling agency. A third, an American-born Chinese, Vanness Wu, came from Los Angeles. And a fourth, Vic Zhou, tagged along with a friend to an audition.
The show, called "Meteor Garden," was a swift hit, as was the band Sony then created for them, called F4 for "Flowers Four."
A phenomenon like "Meteor Garden" used to take years to make it across the 100 miles that separate Taiwan from China. But these days -- thanks to the Internet and a Chinese youth culture that spans Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Singapore and overseas Chinese communities in the United States, Canada and elsewhere -- the lag has shrunk to three months at most. The relative freedom enjoyed by entertainers in Taiwan and Hong Kong means their products are more competitive than those of their counterparts on the mainland. So much so that the Chinese government has imposed a yearly quota on the number of live acts from Taiwan and Hong Kong that perform in China.
Sky Wang and her friends saw the soap opera soon after it took off in Taiwan. Some of their rich friends in Shanghai saw it via illegal satellite TV dishes that can pick up Taiwanese television in their homes, located in gated communities generally beyond the purview of Chinese police. Others, like Wang, found out about it through friends on the Internet in Taiwan and then bought a pirated video disc of the 19-part show.
"The first time I saw it I spent a full weekend just watching it, day and night," she said. "I was addicted. I laughed, I cried. I had never seen anything like it."
By the beginning of this year, Chai had won approval from China's State Administration of Radio, Film and Television to air "Meteor Garden" in China. Censors left 300 minutes of the series on the cutting room floor, chopping it down to 15 parts by deleting fistfights -- over girls -- and scenes of the boys mouthing off to their teachers.
The Sony music corporation, meanwhile, had gotten F4 in the studio and cut an album, calling it "Meteor Rain." It also won approval from the Ministry of Culture to sell the album in China.
As the "Meteor Garden" TV show broke records in Taiwan, and then caught on in Singapore and Hong Kong, the price for the rights per TV station in China rose to $250,000. Those stations, all of which are state-run, in turn used the series' popularity as a way to jack up advertising fees.
"This show was creating a gold mine," said Wei Lili, one of the agents who sold the show in China.
Chinese TV stations began airing the show at the beginning of the year. Within a few months, many of the 900-odd TV stations in small or medium-size cities had shown "Meteor Garden." In bigger cities, like Beijing and Shanghai, where TV stations are forced to hew to a more conservative ideological line, the show had not aired.
Nonetheless, the craze blossomed here and in Beijing. "There was no way they could block it here. This is Shanghai," said Zhang Lulu, a 19-year-old devotee of the group.
She maintained that government bans cannot work in a society that also tolerates widespread pirating of compact discs and videos: "When girls like us have needs, there is nothing anyone can do to stop us."
Fans snapped up pirated video discs of the show. Zhang said she bought at least 50 as gifts for friends. Within five months, meanwhile, Sony had sold 500,000 copies of the "Meteor Rain" album and estimated that another 5 million pirated versions had flooded the market.
"We have never really seen anything like this before," said Antonio Chen, a Sony executive who was dispatched from Taiwan to handle the F4 phenomenon.
One Chinese woman, 22-year-old Lu Jing from Fujian province, paid $2,500 to stow away on a rickety fishing boat for three days to sneak into Taiwan and find the band. When police caught her on March 22 and expressed shock at the cost and the risk of her trip, she retorted: "Is that too much?"
With their rugged good looks, shaggy locks and toned bodies, the F4 boys tapped into an urban youth culture hungry for sex, excitement and love, and comfortably installed on the far side of a wide generation gap.
Two decades ago, China's youth were wearing blue and green Mao suits and had just been freed from memorizing Mao Zedong's Little Red Book. But their sons and daughters have grown up during a time of unprecedented social and cultural freedom, a moral vacuum and a curiosity about a range of once-taboo subjects revolving around personal freedom.
China's media pontificated at length about the phenomenon, praising the F4 boys as a new type of hero ready to replace the staid martyrs of China's revolutionary past. One essayist intoned that F4 had overshadowed Jiang Jie, a young Communist Party woman executed during the Chinese revolution and exalted as a martyr ever since.
"Is This the Meteor Age?" another newspaper asked.
"My dad has made comparisons between me and the Red Guard," said Wang, referring to bands of ultra-leftist revolutionaries caught up in Mao's cult of personality during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. "But we're very different. I really know F4. My support for them comes from my heart."
Then on March 8, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, the very organization that had approved the show, issued a one-sentence statement that read, in part: "Because Meteor Garden can easily mislead the youth, it is being temporarily taken off the air."
In China, Money Talks
Ever since 1942, when Mao proclaimed that art should serve the interests of the Communist Party, culture and politics have been deeply intertwined in China. Most recently, President Jiang Zemin has called on Chinese artists and entertainers to build a "socialist spiritual civilization."
But the work of China's propaganda ministries has been complicated by 20 years of economic reforms. The commercialization of the entertainment industry and the emergence of interest groups focused on profit, not politics, have changed culture in China.
Advertising revenue was almost nonexistent here 20 years ago. Last year, experts estimate it approached $10 billion. Chinese own more than 300 million television sets, and 400 million people read newspapers, significant increases from 20 years ago.
Money and the market now talk, and talk big, in China.
The commercialization of Chinese culture also means more competition among TV stations and other outlets. Some companies play a sly game, lobbying propaganda officials to ban competitors' shows for ideological reasons when the real reason is their popularity.
Foreign influences, absent in the past, are also rampant. Pirated copies of many American movies are available in China just weeks after they premiere in the United States, meaning any attempt to ban a movie or TV show seems doomed to failure. Nationwide, Chinese own more than 100 million video disc players, government statistics show. China's south is dotted with factories that churn out video discs.
Once something is banned, an even bigger market is created; like most people, the Chinese are attracted to forbidden fruit. The banned show is pirated and sold in plain view on the streets and in stores throughout China. Combined with the lack of a clear definition of the party's "socialist spiritual civilization," the changes make the propaganda ministries and their aging czar, Ding Guanggen, seem out of step with the times.
Early this year, for example, Ding saw Arnold Schwarzenegger doing an advertisement for an electronics company on Chinese TV, Chinese government sources said. Ding ordered Schwarzenegger's ad off the air because he said the actor's movies were too violent. Bubugao Electronics Industry Co., the Chinese firm, attempted to breach its contract with the actor. A U.S. law firm was called in and threatened to seize the firm's assets abroad. The firm settled with Schwarzenegger.
In mid-May, Ding tried to stop Chinese TV stations from showing foreigners in commercials, arguing that ads by South Korean actress Kim Hee Sun, who hawks mobile phones, were encouraging "excessive materialism," a government source said. TV stations, advertisers and major companies fought Ding's move, and by early June China's media, which had reported Ding's criticism, were calling the whole issue "a rumor" as a way for the government to save face. Kim's contract, with Chinese manufacturer TCL, was reportedly worth $7.5 million.
In the case of "Meteor Garden," two events precipitated the ban, Chinese sources said.
China's main television station, Central Television, known as CCTV, was angered because F4 declined an invitation -- sent with a week's notice -- to come to China in January to participate in the annual Spring Festival variety show, watched by an estimated 800 million Chinese. CCTV was also resentful that local stations were making fat profits by airing "Meteor Garden," the sources said.
"There was a lot of jealousy involved. CCTV was unhappy about the competition" from local TV stations that were showing the program, Angie Chai said.
Then in early March, as China's legislators gathered for the annual session of parliament in Beijing, some lawmakers came to the capital with stories that the show was affecting the tranquillity of Chinese family life. China's youth were mimicking slang from the pirated videos, mouthing off to teachers and falling in love, and it was all F4's fault, some legislators argued.
The legislators' complaints, made at a closed session of the National People's Congress, dovetailed with CCTV's lobbying. The show and anything associated with it, including F4, was banned.
What happened next, however, demonstrated that a government ban in China today is no longer the last word. First, video pirates, generally the main beneficiaries of any government prohibition, cranked up production. Since the ban, an estimated 3 million copies of "Meteor Garden" have been sold, according to industry sources.
Next, the media jumped in. In the past, a centrally issued ban on a TV show would have been reported, if at all, in a somber and respectful manner by China's state-run media. Not this time. Many newspapers and other media are locked in competition for readership. The youth market for China's newspapers is huge. And many of China's youth love F4. So the result was almost inevitable.
"We made fun of the ban," said a reporter based in the central city of Chengdu, a hotbed of F4 fans. "We thought it was dumb, anyway."
Several papers reported that smaller TV stations were defying the ban because they would go out of business if the show did not go on. Several others reported the huge losses caused by the ban, estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars nationwide and wondered publicly whether anyone would sue the propaganda bureau. Even the normally staid pages of the English-language China Daily mused that the ban could be "counterproductive" because it increased interest in F4 and benefited the vast pirating industry.
Within weeks, Chinese companies and other groups profiting from F4 had succeeded in ensuring that the prohibition was limited to the soap opera. The band, F4, had escaped.
Legend Computer Group, China's leading computer maker and a private company, then waded into the fray. On April 13, it announced the signing of a multimillion-dollar contract with the band to become Legend's "Digital Ambassadors." Legend splashed photographs of the boys, dressed in silver jumpsuits, throughout Chinese newspapers to hawk its new digital cameras and music players.
Just a few years ago, no Chinese firm would have touched anything so closely tied to the banned television show. But, industry sources said, this time the ban only convinced Legend that F4 was truly hot.
Legend then decided to bring F4 to Shanghai.
By early April, Shanghai production companies had completed their application to the Ministry of Culture in Beijing for approval of a concert on May 19. The ministry withheld the authorization until May 16, three days before the show.
The reason was that bureaucrats in Beijing were worried about approving a group that had a black mark against it. In addition, competitors of the production companies had lobbied the ministry to block the show.
"A lot of people were jealous that our firm was going to be the first one to bring F4 to China," said an entertainment executive who worked with Legend in Shanghai. "So they used political excuses to stop us. The ministry got scared and things took a lot longer."
After the permission was granted, however, the battle continued in Shanghai. Competitors of the successful production companies pressured the city government against the show, again arguing that F4 was a bad influence on China's youth, sources said.
"In China, we call this problem red-eye disease," said Pan Dongchen, one of the show's producers, using Chinese slang for jealousy. "In other places, you would compete with me by trying to surpass me. But here people often try to simply stop you from doing something."
Then came May 18 and the F4 explosion in Shanghai.
At one shopping mall, Sky Wang was one of 10,000 screaming females to mob the band. A phalanx of more than 5,000 police responded. The Shanghai Department of Public Security announced that the concert would be canceled because of security concerns. Almost 30,000 tickets had been reserved. Losses reached more than $300,000.
"I've never had a day like that in my life," Wang said as she recounted the events. "I will remember it forever."
And for producer Pan, a jovial Shanghai native with a prominent toupee, it was a memorable experience as well. The boys went on to Los Angeles without performing here, but for Pan it only delayed the inevitable.
"We learned a lot," he said. "Some people told us to quit but I'm not going to. Shanghai is ready for these acts and we're eager to bring them on. Let's do a deal!"
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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