Why Beijing has blocked China’smost popular soap operas
CHINA’S wildly popular soap operas are disappearing.
Two of the three most successful Chinese television series in 2018 - Story of Yanxi Palace and Ruyi’s Royal Love in the Palace - revolved around Emperor Qianlong, an 18thcentury ruler who oversaw expanding territories and a flourishing economy.
Combining House of Cardstype power games with The Bachelor-style cat fights, these two dramas satisfied Chinese audiences’ appetite for overthe-top imperial extravaganza. Yanxi Palace was streamed more than 18 billion times, Ruyi’s Royal Love more than 17.5 billion.
Then in late January 2019, they vanished from TV screens around the country - both were suddenly taken off air after the state-owned newspaper, Beijing Daily, accused such dramas of being “incompatible with core socialist values.”
In a culture with a long tradition of using history to debate the present, historical soap operas are often read as commentaries on the current regime.
The Qing Empire was a period of tremendous demographic and economic growth. Under Qianlong’s reign, territory almost doubled after the conquest of Dzungar Khanate (today’s Xinjiang), Mongolia and other Inner Asian countries. He also commissioned the largest collection of books in Chinese history, “Siku qu an shu ”(“Emperor’ s Four Treasures”), which shaped the Chinese cultural orthodoxy. His reign was the pinnacle of imperial autocracy. In older Western accounts, he has often been compared to the Sun King, Louis XIV of France.
After 1949, the Communist regime rewrote Chinese history according to their Marxist and anti-traditionalist framework: Imperial China was a feudal society, they claimed, and emperors were the embodiment of the oppressive landlord class.
Now, Qianlong’s reign is styled as the good old days, before Western imperialism brought the so-called “a hundred years of national humiliation” - military defeats, foreign concessions and economic exploitation. It is remembered as the last glorious age in Chinese history, when the Qing empire was the superpower of the world.
But there is a problem with this memory. The Communist Party’s long-standing antifeudal ideology, on which its legitimacy was built, makes it impossible to openly embrace Qianlong’s “glory” days as the inspiration for China’s future. Praises for Qianlong’s imperial magnificence could easily be read as a nostalgia for the feudal past, thus a criticism of the socialist revolution. Or even worse, a sign that many want the People’s Republic to become a new empire.
The result is an ambivalent and sometimes conflicting attitude toward Qianlong the emperor. In 2013, when The Economist featured President Xi on its cover in the imperial robe of Qianlong with the headline “Let’s party like it’s 1793,” the magazine was immediately censored in China.
Fictional stories about Qianlong reflect and fulfil a popular fantasy encouraged by the current regime’s geopolitical ambitions but not, apparently, under the authorities’ full control. To officials, the magnificent life presented in these two targeted dramas is too decadent and too monarchist, and the portrayal of the palace struggles is too close to today’s political reality. This is why such soap operas are both seductive and threatening.
Openly admiring or criticizing Qianlong has become risky for television producers, audiences and even the party itself. Yanxi Palace and Ruyi’s Imperial Love are still available on the online streaming platforms, but comments on China’s popular social media site Weibo defending their positive “values” were marginalised.
To avoid trouble, many television stations have pulled similar period dramas from their 2019 programming slate. — Washington Post/Wang FeiHsien is an assistant professor of history at Indiana University Bloomington.