BEIJING — When viewers tuned into China’s most popular dating show this spring, they saw beautiful women, brutal rejections and plenty of money worshiping, as when a female contestant was asked by a possible date whether she would like to go for a bicycle ride.
“I’d rather sit and cry in the back of a BMW,” she said.
Or when another woman, asked for a handshake, responded: “Only my boyfriend gets to hold my hand. Everyone else, 200,000 renminbi per shake,” or about $29,475.
Such witticisms made “If You Are the One,” produced by Jiangsu TV, the most watched reality television program in the country. Then the censors started watching.
Late last May, central government propaganda officials issued a directive calling the shows “vulgar” and faulting them for promoting materialism, openly discussing sexual matters and “making up false stories, thus hurting the credibility of the media.”
So the dating show, and others like it, got a makeover. Gone are fast cars, luxury apartments and boasts of flush bank accounts. Now the contestants entice each other with tales of civic service and promises of good relations with future mothers-in-law. One show now uses a professor from the local Communist Party school as a judge.
China’s television programmers are not far behind their Western counterparts in tapping demand for salacious entertainment. But that tends to conflict, sooner or later, with official notions of propriety and taste in China, which are a lot further behind.
“Traditionally for the government, there are several functions of the television industry,” said Ouyang Hongsheng, a media professor at Sichuan University. “Entertainment is last.”
Although all television stations are still state-owned, stations owned by provincial governments now compete with one another for ratings, national cable distribution and advertising revenue. The profits from these stations go back to local agencies, so provincial-level officials often think more about padding their budgets than enforcing decorum in the public media.
Still, central government propaganda officials reserve the right to intervene. And the minders in Beijing have no financial stake in the shows.
Since its debut in January, “If You Are the One” has been at the center of the storm. Each episode is like a game, as 24 women are presented with a parade of eligible bachelors. The men are subjected to abrasive questioning and ego-deflating sound effects of rejection. The entire process, 30 minutes in taping, is edited down to about 10 minutes on screen. The result is what might happen if the “The Bachelor” and “The Gong Show” produced an offspring with attention-deficit disorder.
Before the changes, the courtship tended to focus on financial matters, and the decisions were swift and ruthless. Personal introduction videos were stamped with “owns car, house” (or the unfortunate opposite) on the bottom half of the screen.
During one precensorship episode, a woman said to a potential 33-year-old suitor, “You say you’re good at what you do, but then how can you still just be a salesman?”
Another contestant, the 20-year-old son of a wealthy businessman, showed off his multicolored sports cars and bank statements that indicated a balance of six million renminbi (about $884,000).
Ma Nuo, 22, the woman who professed to prefer crying in a BMW over riding a bike, denied in an interview that she thought too much about money. She said the producers played up her comment for publicity. “I only wanted to reject him, but in a creative way,” she said.
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