Celebrating the New Year in the suburbs of Tianjin, fireworks are still banned here, but in order to ward off evil spirits, this year’s firecrackers were set off with particular abandon, and the TV could barely be heard on New Year’s Eve. When it was rebroadcast, I watched it and missed the hot news.
This year, there are obviously more people in my WeChat Moments watching the Spring Festival Gala. I saw several people who had never watched it before, and they watched it this year and kept posting comments.
Twenty years ago, missing a certain program of the Spring Festival Gala was a big deal, and you had to catch up on it as soon as possible; in the past ten years, I have known nothing about the Spring Festival Gala for several years, and the ability to create memes for the Spring Festival has plummeted. I won’t feel that I don’t understand the conversation or that I’ve missed billions of people if I don’t watch it at all. Overseas travel has just resumed, and there are obviously fewer people traveling abroad this Spring Festival. Most people are staying at home, accompanying each other, and watching the Spring Festival Gala with their families.
The 2023 Spring Festival Gala has some innovations, such as the round-table talk show, the collection of online celebrities from all over the country singing ‘Good Morning Longhui’, the chorus of ethnic minority singers, the mother-daughter chorus of Huang Qishan, Mao Buyi’s ‘Hello, Stranger’, and the trumpet player’s ‘I want to be on the Spring Festival Gala’, all of which are quite memorable. (In parentheses, the lyrics of the song ‘Good Morning, Longhui’ are really clumsy and awkward. Since everyone says that language programs are difficult to make, let’s change the Spring Festival Gala to a song party in the future—it can better serve as the BGM on New Year’s Eve.)
As for the language programs, except for ‘Pit’, they are all pits. ‘Pit’ is the best program of this Spring Festival Gala. From the lines, it can be slightly extended to ‘the people’s lack of awareness of the defense of the socialist road’, which can be used as a summary and complaint of the tossing and pain of 2022.
For the Spring Festival Gala, expectations have been lowered again and again, and the audience is no longer harsh, because the society torn apart by the epidemic and the Russia-Ukraine conflict, etc., especially needs a summary of a peaceful and prosperous event to anesthetize and suture the wounds. So there is no need to complain about the Spring Festival Gala.
What I want to say is not the Spring Festival Gala, but what is behind the Spring Festival Gala.
This year’s Spring Festival Gala has a particularly strong sense of indoctrination. The program settings and the lines of the hosts give people the feeling that they have taken care of all aspects, and are particularly comprehensive and complete. This is the political task of this gala, which must be a grand event that unites people, inspires people, and gives people hope.
But the painstakingly created scene of national harmony and universal joy is actually just a hypothetical state. The scenes presented in the sketches, the family-friendly atmosphere and the lively scenes of the big family celebrating the New Year, are relatively rare. In reality, it is a lot to have a family of five celebrating the New Year’s Eve together, and many are families of three, or even two or one person celebrating the New Year.
According to the 2021 China Statistical Yearbook, there are 494.16 million households in China, of which 125.49 million are one-person households, accounting for more than 25%. They are mainly composed of elderly single-person households and young single-person households. Many of them are celebrating the festival alone. I wonder if they will be stimulated by those ‘false prosperity’ on the Spring Festival Gala? They should be the objects of care, and should not be squeezed by a gala like they are now.
New Year’s Eve and the first day of the Lunar New Year are very unfriendly to singles and people living alone. Shopping malls, restaurants, and entertainment venues will be closed, and the streets will be empty. At this time, celebrating the festival alone will probably feel even more sad. If this person goes to watch the Spring Festival Gala again, they will probably feel a disaster-level full-process mockery.
Chizuko Ueno mentioned in her book ‘Growing Old in the Way You Like’ that she has some ‘New Year’s Eve family’ who are all single and gather together on New Year’s Eve to accompany each other. I also saw in my WeChat Moments that some people now have New Year’s Eve families. A painter friend spent New Year’s Eve with several friends; a young man showed photos of several friends making New Year’s Eve dinner themselves. These creations are a rebellion against the unified Spring Festival.
The setting of traditional New Year customs comes from the greatest common divisor of society at that time—the multi-child family, so it will revolve around ‘liveliness’, but corresponding to China’s one-child policy and the current reality of fewer children, those festival settings will feel outdated. For example, for one-child families, those who have daughters will have to experience loneliness on New Year’s Eve, and those who have sons will have to experience loneliness on the second and third days of the Lunar New Year when their daughters return to their parents’ homes. And the New Year customs have not changed with the times, constantly reminding you that there is no reunion and not enough fulfillment.
In China, people must be managed. In addition to the government and work units, everyone must also be included in the patriarchal family system, and must be restrained by parents and elders, otherwise they are lonely ghosts and are easily ‘targeted’. Therefore, everyone is ‘afraid’ and has to desperately climb onto the ‘mainstream’ ship, and even be more greedy, and desperately climb onto the ‘vested interests’ ship. Those who have not boarded the ship and do not want to board the ship are ignored and covered up.
The Spring Festival Gala is also becoming less and less in touch with the reality of life. Now divorced families, single-parent families, DINK families, unmarried mothers, sexual minorities, and wives of homosexuals, these groups are all huge in number, but they are impossible to appear on the stage of the Spring Festival Gala. The Spring Festival Gala, which strives for reunion and happiness, tries its best to satisfy various groups and hopes to take care of all aspects, but what it takes care of is still the mainstream in the mainstream discourse system. The minority groups will not be taken care of, as if implying that the minority groups and minority needs should hide in the dark corners and not be presentable.
The New Year is mainly for children. For families without children, the scenes of family happiness and harmony may be a strong stimulus. They can usually avoid it, but they can’t avoid the Spring Festival Gala and the Spring Festival.
Another change this year is the strong performance of liquor companies. This year’s Spring Festival Gala, internet companies have stepped down, and Wuliangye has become the main sponsor, and Shede Wine has also become a partner. The strong performance of liquor means the return of tradition. The criticism and resistance to liquor and ugly liquor culture in the past few years ended in failure. Chinese liquor has increased significantly, and liquor culture, patriarchy, and some of the dregs of tradition are mutually dependent and mutually beneficial.
A similar change is that there are more kowtows. I saw many scenes of New Year’s greetings and kowtows this year. The Chinese people, who had finally stood up, knelt down again. They did not kneel to their parents, but to those things that Lu Xun and the New Culture Movement had tried to overthrow.
I’m going too far. In short, the Spring Festival Gala is all about flowers and brocades, and it will not touch the real problems—how to rebuild the spiritual damage caused by the epidemic, and the imminent pension problem. These are not suitable for performance on the Spring Festival Gala. The Spring Festival Gala has become the biggest manufacturer of false prosperity, a tool of rule, and a strong anesthetic that everyone has been looking forward to for a year.
Everyone is immersed in this false reality full of splendor, and then they continue on their way in the new year, continuing to ‘let illusions support us to live’.
This trend of return is difficult to change, and at the same time, you cannot expect the creators of the Spring Festival Gala to understand the real public sentiment—it takes 39 years to be noticed if you write a letter, which shows their arrogance and arrogance. Therefore, you can only weakly complain.
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