FOXNews.com - Upstart challenges Chinese state TV New Year show - Science News | Science & Technolog

FOXNews.com - Upstart challenges Chinese state TV New Year show - Science News | Science & Technology | Technology NewsFriday, January 23, 2009By MIN LEE, AP Entertainment WriterHONG KONG--A Beijing-based wedding videographer will debut his homespun Lunar New Year gala Sunday in a Webcast featuring rappers and stuntmen that poses a small but unprecedented challenge to Chinese state television's hugely popular variety show.Shi Mengqi's answer to the "Spring Festival Gala" shows how bored many Chinese have become with the propaganda-laden program, which for nearly three decades has defined the holiday for mainlanders.China Central Television's annual four-hour extravaganza usually draws an audience of 800 million _ about eight times more than the Super Bowl did last year. A typical broadcast includes patriotic tributes to astronauts and Olympic gold medalists, cheerful song and dance numbers from Tibetans and other ethnic minorities and traditional _ some say old _ comedy routines.By contrast, Shi's laid-back, fun-spirited show will jettison the earnestly moral and devoutly communist overtones. Among the expected performances: human beatbox rappers, a 7-year-old dressed up like a monkey after China's beloved Monkey King character, a song about the hardscrabble life of China's migrant workers and a stuntman riding a bike face down, rotating the pedals with his hands.Shi has dubbed it CCSTV _ short for China Countryside TV."The CCTV show is mainstream," Shi said. "It's urging people to do this and that. Our show reflects what ordinary people are actually doing."The show is deliberately amateurish, in keeping with a recent trend in popular culture known as "shanzhai" (pronounced shan-jai), which refers to down-market, homemade knock-offs, including video parodies of movies.CCTV's "stage and lighting are very good. My stage and lighting are very bad. Most of its performers are very professional. Most of my performers are very unprofessional," Shi said in a recent phone interview from Beijing.In recent years, some provincial TV stations have staged their own Chinese New Year shows, but unlike Shi, none have dared to air their programs in the 8 p.m. to 12 a.m time block when CCTV airs its gala.An editorial in the Beijing News newspaper published Tuesday urged the producers of the CCTV show to lighten up and ax the politically correct comedy routines that deliver a moral message or extol communist successes. It called the skits "out of touch.""Increasingly, people have very little tolerance for anything that smacks of propaganda," said Rebecca MacKinnon, a journalism professor at the University of Hong Kong and an expert on Internet issues in China. "There is a widening gap between the middle-aged to older generation who still read newspapers and watch CCTV news and the Internet generation."Still, Shi's Webcast could be risky in a country where the government still imposes tight media controls.He is being cautious. A message on his Web site says the Webcast won't be political. In an interview, he praised CCTV's gala for its "very high artistic level" and called his alternative offering a "small supplement" to a "sumptuous main course."A CCTV external affairs official declined comment, saying "If we had to comment about it every day, we would be swamped."Media analysts say the government is unlikely to crack down on the show as long as Shi stays away from controversial subjects. They note that CCTV remains dominant."If you don't have CCTV's ability to stick that program in front of half a billion people you're just not in the competition. I can't see that they would be worried," said Jeremy Goldkorn, editor-in-chief of Danwei, a Web site that covers Chinese media issues.While China has an estimated nearly 300 million Internet users, connections can be slow in many households and non-existent in much of rural China, a major audience for CCTV."Most people are at home with their families and their grannies. Granny turns on the TV. She doesn't go to Tudou.com," Goldkorn said, referring to a popular Chinese video sharing Web site.Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.