Big Dreams on the Small Screen: The Cultural Politics of the CCTV Spring Festival Gala (1983-2024)

<p dir="ltr">This thesis examines the CCTV Spring Festival Gala (Chunwan, 春晚), one of the mostwatched live television broadcasts globally, with a focus on its role as an ideological and cultural phenomenon that interpellates its audience as members of a national community. As a state-produced variety show broadcast annually on Chinese New Year’s Eve, the Gala blends entertainment with state ideology, reinforcing notions of national unity, familial kinship, and collective belonging. While its propagandistic tone is often critiqued, the Gala remains a deeply embedded tradition in contemporary Chinese society. This thesis investigates why audiences continue to watch, respond to, and interact with the Gala, even as they simultaneously critique its overt political messaging. It argues that the Gala is more than a top-down ideological tool; rather, it is a dynamic cultural event that channels and negotiates viewers’ desires for connection, recognition, and participation in an imagined national community.</p><p dir="ltr">Drawing on Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation, this study explores the ways in which the Gala “hails” its viewers as “Chinese brothers and sisters”, inviting them to recognise themselves as part of a larger collective. The thesis questions whether this interpellation is effective, whether it functions in a straightforward manner, or whether it operates ironically—through rejection, negotiation, or passive engagement, as evidenced by the phenomenon of ambient watching (where viewers keep the Gala on as background noise) and the widespread online culture of “roasting” the Gala. By critically examining audience reception, this study challenges the conventional notion of the Gala as a purely didactic tool of state propaganda and instead positions it as a complex site of negotiation between authority, entertainment, and collective identity formation.</p><p dir="ltr">This research is structured around six thematic chapters. The first chapter, “Introduction”, presents what the Gala is as my research object, and outlines the thesis’s theoretical framework and methodology. The second chapter, “The Invention of the Gala: Imagining a New Chinese Community”, situates the Gala within Eric Hobsbawm’s framework of “invented traditions”, arguing that the Gala manufactures cultural rituals and symbols that project a sense of continuity between past, present, and future. The third chapter, “Coding Familial Desires: The Filiative Machine in the Gala’s China”, applies Deleuze and Guattari’s discussions on family and capitalism to examine how the Gala constructs an interpellative family-state, reinforcing both small-scale (nuclear family) and large-scale (nation-state) kinship ties to strengthen national cohesion.</p><p dir="ltr">The fourth and fifth chapters shift focus to the aesthetic mechanisms that make the Gala watchable and memorable. Chapter Four, “Panda Power: Cuteness in the Gala”, engages with Sianne Ngai’s theorisation of cuteness to investigate how the Gala’s representation of children, animals, and women fosters feelings of protection and ownership, reflecting broader social dynamics of gender and consumer culture. Chapter Five, “China Intensified: The Zany Skits in the Gala”, explores the role of zaniness—another of Ngai’s aesthetic categories—as a key mechanism for ideological messaging. Through humour, the Gala’s comedy skits create a shared cultural experience, reinforcing identity through collective laughter while subtly accommodating state narratives.</p><p dir="ltr">The final chapter concludes by arguing that the Gala is more than a cultural artefact or a propaganda tool; it is a dynamic ideological apparatus that interpellates viewers into a modern Chinese national identity that is built around nostalgia, familial love, consumer aesthetics, and labour intensity.</p><p dir="ltr">Ultimately, this thesis argues that the Gala’s power lies not simply in its ability to indoctrinate but in its capacity to act as a mirror of contemporary Chinese society, capturing its transformations, contradictions, and desires. By rethinking the Gala as both an ideological machine and a space of cultural negotiation, this thesis provides a fresh lens for understanding the intersection of media, nationalism, and identity in contemporary China.</p>