China TV

I have seen the two first parts and was not really impressed. My (Chinese) company fell asleep as she thought it was too boring.
They have simplified the China experience to such a degree, it was close to misleading. In the first part we saw as guest documentary maker Zhang Hua (a new name for me). They showed clips from two documentaries, one a state-staged show on how China deals with younger people who fall out of the system (at least according to that system), but was following the correct political line of the tv stations in the bigger cities.
The second documentary was very rough and more real life, but only one clip made it to Phoenix TV in Hong Kong and would never be shown on mainstream TV. But they did not explain the difference, suggesting that Chinese TV would show almost anything.
The second part was slightly better, with Stefan Landsberger as guest. He unfortunately sees Confucius still as the leading intellectual force of 1.3 billion people, wrongly I think, and framed his story around that misunderstanding. He also looked at the China TV from an almost exclusively Beijing perspective, ignoring much of the variation and the quality of some of the provincial TV stations. At least he annoyed me enough to look again this evening, unless something better comes up.

I keep my fingers crossed for your part, Marc. But I just saw that Yang Rui of Dialogue is another guest. I might not expose myself to that ultimate test.

For the presentation it was of course already a blessing they had not asked Lulu Wang to do that. Wang has still to produce her first coherent sentence. They needed of course somebody who had the personality and Mandarin skills to deal with also the Chinese guests, but Julie seemed to lack a decent understanding how China TV is working and how China has changed.
That was illustrated nicely when she discussed Lei Feng in the third part with professor Zhang Tongdao (a rather unknown media expert from a rather small Beijing teachers college). Julie seemed to think that the concept of Lei Feng would still be a valid one in the China of today, a misunderstanding professor Zhang fortunately noted. Nobody who has lived for some time in China over the past decade would still take Lei Feng very serious, apart from the government propaganda.
Still, for me it was nice chit-chat, but nothing revealing, while it might still be abracadabra for the Dutch viewer who has only little clue about China.

I agree, Bas: I was just again wondering what the whole idea was behind the program was. Julie O’Yang seemed to stumble from one brain wave to the other where even this anchor of the ‘China TV’ was ignored for most of the program. Suddenly the two of you were talking about suicide in China, while there was not clear reason to do so. And that was only moment when I wondered when she would also leave China as a subject. That did not happen, but again the concept seemed to be rather weak and not helping a lot in piecing things together.