Pro wrestling taps in for test in China
WANG Bin looked down. A man wearing a blue, skintight unitard writhed at his feet. Wang grinned. This was the moment he had been waiting for.
So, too, had Cheng Shi. When Wang lifted the writhing man and slammed him to the floor for a three-count, it completed Cheng’s dream of watching a professional wrestler – battling in that most American of fake spectacles – who hails from China.
“I feel very proud and excited to see him onstage tonight, and so do all the fans,” Cheng, a 21-year-old student who makes fan videos for a Chinese audience, said before the match. He pointed at the screen of his smartphone to indicate the thousands of people watching him on his live broadcast. “We are very, very excited.”
Looking for eyeballs and new money sources, World Wrestling Entertainment – the company that brought Hulk Hogan and Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson into US living rooms – has grand ambitions for a bigger but much more difficult market. It has started a new service live-streaming Chineselanguage matches and commentary. It is also combing China’s provinces for more beefy talent like Wang.
China presents formidable challenges. Entertainment names like Netflix and Rupert Murdoch have taken aim at China’s population of 1.4 billion only to run afoul of the country’s tight controls over media. Wrestling’s cartoon violence and sometimes salacious story lines could attract unwanted attention from the government. And while it has its fans, US-style wrestling-as-scriptedentertainment is largely unheard-of among mainland Chinese.
“There is no presence of product over here,” said John Cena, the squarejawed wrestler and action movie star who has learned to speak some Chinese as part of the push. By tackling the language, he added, “I’m kind of a vehicle to leverage what we’ve done.”
Its answer is to go local – and digital. Bypassing state-controlled broad- cast TV, it has teamed with a videostreaming company.
It has also geared up efforts to introduce a new audience to the suplex, the body slam and the drop-kick. WWE has hired four social media directors in Shanghai to maintain locallanguage social media accounts for its wrestlers. It is also hosting viewing parties, like one this month in the Chinese city of Guangzhou, in which locals devoured pizza and cream sodas while watching a pay-per-view wrestling match and playing WWE’s latest Xbox video game.
Success requires exposing the audiences to a new type of entertainment.
“They’ve never really seen anything like us,” said Paul Levesque, WWE’s executive in charge of talent, who is also a partly retired wrestler better known as Triple H. “The athleticism is very real. The storylines and the theatre part of it is where they had a hard time with the blurred line of that.”
To friends unfamiliar with wrestling, the “I find that the shortest way to tell them is to say it’s an American version – a global version – of the kung fu novel,” said Jay Li, a longtime executive at multinational companies in China who in April joined WWE as its general manager for greater China. “They get it immediately, because they immediately have a cultural connection and a mental image of what this is about.”
In October, WWE told investors it was still waiting to offer subscriptions directly to Chinese viewers.
For now, it works with a Chinese video company service called PPTV, which streams the company’s weekly flagship shows, with real-time Mandarin commentary. (Suplex, in case you were wondering, translates as deshi beishuai, or “German-style back throw”.) PPTV subscriptions start at less than $3 per month, roughly a third of what WWE’s subscription service costs outside of China, and include movies and other shows.
Much rides on Wang, WWE’s first mainland wrestler. The company’s social media team works to make him a star.
Wang, a 22-year-old native of eastern Anhui province, was an athlete after middle school, a member of the provincial rowing team. He later moved to Shanghai and took up sparring, where he caught the attention of representatives from Inoki Genome Federation, a big Japanese wrestling and mixed martial arts promotion.
Wang spent three years in Japan before he was noticed by the WWE. He signed a development deal with the US company and started training in Orlando this summer in preparation for his China debut.