300m
... is the amount in renminbi or yuan of annual advertising revenues dismissed by the Chongqing Satellite Television Channel, which is seeking a more Maoist take on prime-time entertainment.
There are several views on the evolving social, political and economic drama in western China’s “red capital” of Chongqing. For some, China’s biggest municipality is a vigorous catalyst for the Next Big Thing — the huge shift inland of industrial power and wealth from the eastern coastal provinces. There are signs that the process has already started: the factories of Guangdong (in the east) are short of migrant workers (from the west) because those people can find jobs closer to their families.
Others focus on the ideological experiments taking place in Chongqing, which seek to “help the poor and guide the rich” but do so with a roar of old-fashioned leftism. The city’s “red GDP” campaign aims to give the State more control over the economy and put thousands into public housing, while luring peasants from their farms to the cities.
Everyone, though, is transfixed by the personalities at the centre of all this: Huang Qifan, the mayor of Chongqing, and Bo Xilai, its maverick party secretary. They have given the whole enterprise the sort of blunt legitimacy that nobody is quite sure how to interpret.
Advertisement
Examples include texting the revolutionary comments of Mao to every mobile phone in the city and extolling the virtues of “red songs”. Casual park gatherings of retirees have, on Messrs Bo and Huang’s watch, been transformed into formal, 90-minute singalongs to a line-up of red classics.
Red songs, according to Mr Huang, share with the works of Shakespeare an ability to “penetrate time and space” by stimulating red song cells somewhere in the brain.
Bo and Huang have now taken on television. In January, they banned popular sitcoms from the local Chongqing station and replaced them with revolutionary stories and arid documentaries about historical figures.
To demonstrate how easily television can be liberated from vulgar commercialism and capitalist meddling, Mr Huang has banned adverts and rejected their RMB300 million annual income. He described the move as “common international practice” and praised the BBC and Japan’s NHK for existing without “a single minute of advertising”. Capitalist countries, he added, were able to broadcast big events without advertisements, so why not Chongqing?
Unlike the BBC and NHK, however, Chongqing’s “commonwealth channel” will not be supported by licence fees but with public cash drawn directly from the city’s coffers and from 11 other channels that will continue to show adverts.