Both Sides of the Camera
For the past few months, TV personality Dong Qing has been in the national spotlight across China thanks to her work on both Chinese Poetry Competition and Readers, two of the most popular cultural TV programs in China.
But Dong is not an overnight star by any measure. She has been working in the TV industry for more than two decades, during which time she has earned the respect and recognition of her colleagues and viewers alike. As so many people found out in recent months, this veteran is always working on offering new things to spectators.
Sweat and Tears
Dong was born into a family of university professors in Shanghai in 1973. She considers her parents to have been what people call “tiger parents,” especially her father. He was deputy editor-in-chief of a daily newspaper in Jiaxing, Zhejiang Province and advo- cated traditional and strict child-rearing.
“My father was very, very strict with me,” Dong recalled years later. When she was seven, she stayed with her grandparents most of the time and only joined her parents in the city when they were able to have her around. In contrast with many parents with only one child, Dong’s father assigned her lengthy task lists including household chores, a 1,000-meter morning jog and scholastic assignments such as copying Chinese idioms, poems, and essays. “I also received a reading list containing masterpieces such as Jane Eyre, The Lady of the Camellias, War and Peace and Dream of the Red Chamber,” she adds. “My father quizzed me to make sure I was seriously reading them. Today, I still feel like such ‘training’ is cruel to a kid, but I did benefit greatly from my dad’s parenting, which set a solid foundation for my further studies and work.”
“Feeding without teaching should be blamed on the father,” reads a sentence from the time-honored Three-character Classic which was used to teach Chinese children Confucian values until recent times, stressing parents’ responsibility and obligations in child-rearing. Dong has mixed feelings about the treatment, but her father acted like most Chinese parents of his time, showing love for his daughter by making her constantly practice things he thought would help her later in life. While this way of parenting is controversial nowadays, it ultimately produced the desired results for people like Dong and some of her Chinese peers, who are considered more traditional and reserved than younger generations of talent.
“Looking back, I am grateful for everything my father did to me,” Dong admits. “I worked for nobody else but myself. Eventually, all of my efforts paid off in one way or another.”
After graduating from Zhejiang Vocational Academy of Art in 1994, Dong landed her first job as a TV presenter with a Zhejiang TV station. Since then, her career as an on-air host has developed smoothly in general, despite occasional ups and downs. Two years later, her outstanding performance at the local TV station won her the chance to work in Shanghai. In 2002, Dong joined China Central Television (CCTV), the most influential state television broadcaster with access to more than a billion viewers in China. On CCTV, Dong’s gracious and elegant hosting style made her a widely-recognized TV personality.
Back to School
In 2014, at the peak of her hosting career, Dong took a one-year leave-of-absence from CCTV to study at the University of Southern California as a visiting scholar. By then, she had already been hosting the highprofile Spring Festival Gala, one of the most important and widely watched television events in China, for nine straight years and won China’s Golden Microphone Award, the most prestigious award for radio and TV hosts, in 2001 and 2006.
Her decision shocked fans and even her colleagues. In China, hundreds of ambitious and talented newcomers are always vying for a handful of TV jobs, and viewers are quick to forget them.
But Dong insisted on taking the leave. “Everybody has to take some distance to find their better self,” she explained. “Competition in the television industry is fierce, and I really needed to recharge with knowledge through further education. The longer I worked in the industry, the more ignorant
I felt myself becoming.” The ambitious host added that she wanted to learn “how to be a better communicator in modern media of the globalization era” from internationally renowned educators.
For these reasons, becoming a visiting scholar seemed a wise choice. Since China implemented its reform and opening-up policies in the late 1970s, the country has seen several ups and downs in terms of its visiting scholar statistics.
The first boom for Chinese visiting scholars abroad came in the late 1970s and early 1980s. To cultivate more high-end professionals for the country’s development after the “cultural revolution” (1966-1976) , officials and intellectuals were selected from renowned Chinese universities and statelevel academic or research institutes and dispatched to study in Western countries.
The second wave arrived in the early 21st Century and has remained steady ever since. Compared to the people in the first wave, who were sponsored by the government and mostly from academic circles, members of the second wave are far more diverse. And thanks to the “global village” environment today, Chinese intellectuals are even more eager to enhance their expertise in a special field.
Dong promised her fans that she would come back better than ever, and so she did in the summer of 2015. “At thirty, I had planted my feet firm on the ground,” reads The Analects. “At forty, I no longer suffered from perplexities.” Dong was already into her forties, and saw a clear road ahead. She was no longer content with reading a teleprompter, but aimed to become a producer herself.
Path Ahead
From late January to early February 2017, Dong hosted the 10-episode hit Chinese Poetry Competition. Just two weeks after the program concluded, Readers, a new show she produced and hosted, hit Chinese screens. The weekly show features celebrities and ordinary people reading aloud excerpts of poems, essays and books they love or wrote. Participants also share stories or life experiences and explain why they are attracted or moved by particular pieces. Soon after the pilot was aired, Readers earned an impressively high rating on Douban.com, China’s most popular review site. Dong has taken a lead role in the movement to rekindle enthusiasm for literature in China.
Like everything else in her life, this success wasn’t easy either. “My team spent a whole year preparing the program,” Dong revealed. “But you can’t attribute it to just a year of hard work, or even two if you add my time as a visiting scholar. Its success is the result of my two decades of work in the TV industry.”
As a producer, Dong aimed to create a cultural program that was sophisticated with a personal touch. To this end, she carefully chose the guests for the pilot episode of Readers, which was themed “encounter”: 96-year-old eminent translator Xu Yuanchong, respected actor Pu Cunxin, Lenovo founder Liu Chuanzhi and Beijing doctor Jiang Li, who saved lives in war-torn Afghanistan. “I wanted the guests to convey the warmth and attitude of the book and the impact it can make on one’s soul,” Dong said. She also carefully chose books suitable for her guests. “I always eye books that have moved me. Only if the production team and I are touched is there a chance of touching the audience. And of course, each book has to match the personality of the reader.”
Her model proved successful. The highlight of the first episode was the Chinese translator Xu Yuanchong, who has translated more than 100 classics from Chinese to both English and French and in 2014 became the first Asian to win the Aurora Borealis prize, the highest honor for worldwide translators. When the 96-year-old recalled his own experiences with literature in his youth, neither he nor the crew and audiences could hold back their tears.
“The transformation from host to producer presented many challenges,” Dong admits. “I never expected so much difficult work. Still, I insisted we should make a program like this, which would help cultural shows shake off their ‘snobby’ reputation and become more accessible to ordinary people. However, this show’s success has proven that there is a huge demand for cultural shows in China today, so I have a lot more work to do.”