Talent Show, Governmentality and the Chinese Dream

Abstract

Inspired by the Foucauldian concept of governmentality, a critical analytical tool for examining how power is exercised through the guidance of self-disciplined subjects, recent scholarship on “Chinese governmentality” has fruitfully examined various rationalities, tactics and discourses that are associated with governing through self-improvement and self-decision making in China, especially through the suzhi. While not emphasizing rights and liberty, Chinese governmentality involves both a “facilitative” dimension, namely, free individuals pursue their own interest, and an “authoritarian” dimension, that is, the production of controllable citizens who are loyal to the Party-state. The paper examines, through the lens of talent shows on the TV screen, how television plays a central role in producing citizens that are “both loyal to the Party and useful for the market”. A variety of talent shows, singing contests and “idol” shows, most of them copycatted from Western or Korean programs, are becoming increasingly popular in China and are particularly favored by the commercially oriented provincial satellite channels. These programs demonstrate that ordinary people, be they peasants, migrant workers, single mothers or even the disabled, can become celebrities overnight by dint of talent, hard work, persistence, and moral support from family and friends. The inspirational theme (lizhi) of this type of program echoes the ethos of Xi’s Chinese Dream and is in line with technologies devised to foster middle-class subjecthood. Although the government’s hand is never “invisible,” the new images, motifs and discourses that have emerged on the Chinese TV screen urge us to reflect on television’s capacity as an effective device of the “technology of the self” for the post-socialist state, or, in other words, on the production of desirable selfhood through the relatively autonomous consumption of television.