Spiralled CCTV's Chinese New Year Gala of 2004 by Fan Xiang, Bobing Chen and Ying He

Dawes’s work, Cinema Redux, inspired us to take a serious look at how one would go about quantifying the amount of ‘redness’ that pervaded the Chinese media. Would the resulting outcome help to prove that I had a legitimate concern or would it dispels my exaggerated worry?

I chose CCTV gala, the Chinese New Year celebration TV program which is an all-night stage show filled up with performances ranging from traditional songs and dances to pop music and comedies along with a heavy dose of state propaganda, as my experimental object to answer the question I had raised above.

We smashed videos from the Gala over the last 33 years from 1983 through 2015 and refactored frames into various timelines, thus revealing how red-dominated the Chinese mass media really is. Or is the Chinese mass media not as red-dominated as we assumed? Here is the spiraled timeline of 2004’s CCTV gala.

As people say you are what you eat, are we what we watch? We wish this new perspective triggers public reflection and provides answers.

A video of Spiralled Gala can be found on youtube https://youtu.be/MBIOAoVcwfo .