Chinese television at midnight: Television theory in the People’s Republic of China during the Reform Era

Abstract

While most scholarship on Chinese television focuses on the medium’s development after the reform of the industry in the mid-1990s, the 1980s were a period in which different visions for Chinese television were hotly contested. This paper argues for the importance of this moment by examining the theorization of television in Contemporary Television, a publication launched in 1987 as China’s first journal of television aesthetics, and the attempt to achieve a breakthrough in television storytelling in the program Triumphant Return at Midnight (1986). Contributors to Contemporary Television proposed that the essence of the medium was a liveness that linked it to modernity and a small screen that placed it within the private individual home. They advocated for combining television’s inherent popular appeal with ambitious individual artistic visions. This synthesis seemed to be achieved in Triumphant Return, which was both popular with viewers and praised by critics for its ‘epic’ feel, but the production process for Triumphant Return proved both too inefficient for the Chinese television industry. Examining Chinese television and television aesthetics before the introduction of large-scale private funding reveals a surprising convergence in the evolution of socialist and capitalist television industries.