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China’s Newest Action TV Show Is a Propaganda Hit
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China’s Newest Action TV Show Is a Propaganda Hit
On the surface, The Knockout is just like any other cop drama. Filled with police chases, nuanced characters, excellent acting, and thrilling suspense, it’s the hottest new release on Chinese TV and follows a group of intrepid out-of-town officials as they hunt down corrupt local bureaucrats. It has earned an impressive 8.5 points on Douban, China’s user-based reviewing platform, and has dominated hot search feeds on Weibo and Baidu over the past few weeks. Co-producer iQiyi, a commercial online streaming platform with a reputation for creating hit TV shows, saw its stock price rise by almost 10 percent after release. Chinese state broadcaster CCTV says the series gleaned a cumulative total of 319 million viewers on cable TV.To get more news about the knockout chinese drama, you can visit shine news official website.
Not bad for propaganda. At base, The Knockout is a tribute to Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign, co-produced by private studios and supervised by the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission (in charge of China’s justice and law enforcement systems).
It’s part of a broader campaign to popularize propaganda in Chinese film and TV. Over the past decade, the government has managed to harness the power of commercial studios and A-list talent to create increasing quality. Propaganda films have now topped the box office highest-grossing list in China each year for the past six years, and in 2022, the top three TV dramas with the highest TV ratings were all of this genre. In part, this comes from clipping the competition—the number of foreign productions imported into the Chinese market has fallen dramatically since 2019—but also from creating shows the public actually wants to watch.
In Chinese, these propaganda productions are dubbed “main melody.” It’s a term that means mainstream thinking, the zeitgeist—or today, what the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) wants that zeitgeist to be. Reform-minded cadres in the late 1980s wanted media to reflect main melody public views. But after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, the party reasserted itself as the one that set the tone for mainstream thinking. Main melody was its melody.
Since the early 2000s, main melody productions have been market-based shows singing mainstream tunes and glorifying the social and political lines that the CCP wants the public to value and imitate. It’s a broad list, from encouraging good behavior in public places to honoring the CCP’s past struggles, strengthening trust of current policies, or kindling patriotism and cultural confidence.
Until the late 1990s, main melody was the only melody. These films dominated cinemas, stoking patriotic fervor over China’s potential and implying that only the party could release it. But media commercialization meant competition for eyeballs—there was suddenly more choice on TV, and all sorts of commercial films were being imported from the West, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Today, online streaming and short-video apps heighten that competition even further.They offered viewers high-quality alternatives to old main melody formats, beginning to change tastes. “In hindsight,” writes journalist Zeng Yuli, by the early 2000s main melody productions looked ham-fisted, leaning into “grand narratives and hero tropes, with mundane plots in place of story, and slogans in place of dialogue.”
Government initiatives attempted to turn the tide. Since 2011, cinemas have had a 5 percent tax placed on all revenues, creating a special fund to subsidize publicity and promotion for main melody films. But a plethora of these are produced each year with an emphasis on box-ticking over quality. Zhou Xiaolan, a professor at South China Normal University, writes that some studios’ very survival has relied on government subsidy, their films tailored for government rather than audiences’ approval. There are still many truly awful main melody films released each year, playing out to nearly empty theaters.
But that’s increasingly being challenged by private enterprise. Although private studios created a handful of successful main melody productions in the 2000s, today “CCP and government agencies are learning to work very closely with commercial enterprises like iQiyi to produce and distribute state propaganda,” said David Bandurski, the director of the Hong Kong-based China Media Project. These partnerships have been responsible for many popular main melody productions over the past three years.
Private companies such as Bona Film Group, Tencent Pictures, and iQiyi are profit-driven, producing main melody shows that aim for audience engagement, tapping into what has previously drawn crowds: Hollywood-style action films, big stars, eye-catching special effects, and heart-warming patriotism. The Battle at Lake Changjin 2 (co-produced by Douyin, Alibaba Pictures, and the People’s Liberation Army’s own movie studio) had all the explosions and bombastic action sequences of a blockbuster U.S. war film and became the highest-grossing film in China last year. And with a marketing department flush with government funding, good-quality main melody films like Lake Changjin 2 can easily score big at the box office.