Reflections on the 2025 Spring Festival Gala
Propaganda is easy to dismiss when it's ham-fisted. But what about when it's constructed...quite well?
Watching the annual CCTV Spring Festival Gala (春节联欢晚会) for Chinese New Year is always an interesting exercise, and especially so as a contrast to the political SNAFU currently unfolding in the US.1 What began as a simple cultural ritual, suffused with the familiarity and nostalgia of childhood, has over the years also become an opportunity to observe increasing contrasts in worldview2.
Mass-scale, coordinated production of political messaging tends to unnerve us.3 I’ll avoid making hackeneyed references to anything that occurred in, say, the mid 1900s, but this North Korean reception for Putin is a good example:
Weird, right?
The CCP still pulls stuff like this once in a while, but the New Year’s gala tends to forgo such blatantly totalitarian state vibes in favour of a more gentle, artistic touch. In this military-themed dance, CGI ships and melodramatic music take some of the edge off, by virtue of their sheer earnestness. Aesthetically, it’s not too dissimilar from the “listen to this video every day and become a MAN” corner of YouTube:
The most interesting performance I found, however, and the most artfully done, was this group rendition of 万水千山总是情 (literally, “Love is always there despite thousands of miles of mountains and rivers”4), a famous Hong Kong classic from 1982:
The first 3 women are 钟楚曦, 薛凯琪, and 刘惜君 - respected actresses and singers in their own right. One was born in British Hong Kong; the other two are mainlanders, one from Shenzhen and one from Guangzhou. They are dutifully fulfilling their aesthetic roles of providing lovely voices, in addition to having the correct 身材 (figure, or literally, “the material of body”) for vintage qipao dresses. They are all beautiful, they are all talented, and - perhaps most importantly - they form one cohesive unit for the introduction of the song. It’s eye-catching.
But our true veneration and respect is reserved for the lady who is unveiled, solo, at 0:45. She is 77-year old Hong Kong superstar, former National People's Congress delegate, and Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference member 汪明荃 (Liza Wang). She was born in 1947, before the PRC’s creation in 1949. She was born in Shanghai, and moved to Hong Kong in 1956. She originally popularized 万水千山总是情 in 1982:
It’s almost as if her talent and stature in her art is able to transcend politics and borders. It’s a lovely thought. The whole thing is undoubtedly gorgeous in execution (I listened to it several times), and a surprisingly subtle foil against the tense backdrop of Hong Kong’s history5.
Perhaps, just perhaps, we can all get along to produce wonderful things.
Is that the takeaway that I was meant to find here? Or is this just good art - and I’m reading far too much into coincidences?6
A common response to an identity crisis is to throw caution to the wind and start tearing things apart. The best possible interpretation of this is that shaking things up and breaking down some long-calcified structures will allow something better to rise from the ashes. The worst possible interpretation is that the US is currently experiencing the political equivalent of a child having a temper tantrum and dumping their entire plate on the floor.
In my search for American propaganda to compare and contrast with, this simply struck me as the most appropriate choice, ironic as it might be:
In fact, for those of us who live that disconnected city life and consider it a massive undertaking just to plan brunch with friends, coordination of any form is a remarkable thing. What I found most impressive about this well-known video was not the proposal, but the fact that this man was able to convince 50+ of his friends and family to rehearse this dance at all, and that they actually showed up:
I found a thoughtful translation here: https://ingenio.stanford.edu/2022/love-and-passion
I’m not going to bother pretending that it’s possible to find a neutral explainer for the political situation of Hong Kong in relation to mainland China, so I’ll simply post both this article from the Council for Foreign Relations (https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/hong-kong-freedoms-democracy-protests-china-crackdown), as well as this page from the PRC’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs: https://www.mfa.gov.cn/eng/zy/wjls/3604_665547/202405/t20240531_11367565.html
I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention this random American band’s appearance in the Wuhan portion of the 2025 CCTV gala, set against the historic national treasure, 黄鹤楼 (Yellow Crane Building).
At first I thought it was just some generic status signaling (bc white things are cool!), and then I realized the band was….OneRepublic.
Who said the CCP media folks don’t have a sense of humour?!