The invention of Chinese “media tradition”: Mediatization of festival tradition and family cultural reproduction in contemporary China

Abstract

The popularity of Internet and mobile media in China has weaken the collective TV viewing culture in Chinese families. Behind the decline of television, the China Central Television’s Spring Festival Gala Show (Gala Show) is hard to maintain its glory and gradually being questioned and challenged. Why does TV viewing and Gala Show still matter in some families but not the others? This paper conceptualizes and analyzes how and why the Gala Show became a media tradition, in the Chinese family-nation cultural reproduction for more than three decades. Based on twofold interviewing data collected by 2015 and 2021, respectively, the study found that the invented media tradition-the Gala Show, stimulates the cultural changes and continuity of Chinese family cultural traditions from the golden age of television (from the 1980s to the late 2000s) onwards. In the long processes of its cultural transformation, the evolving media tradition blends past and present cultural materials in the social institution, thus (re)shaping the cultural practices and values of the participants. Moreover, the interviews revealed that ordinary people read the roles of Gala Show as a media tradition in Chinese families differently, because the social implications of the Gala Show shifted and reacted to the social and cultural transformation from the age of television onwards. Finally, regarding the dynamic social changes in media technologies, Spring Festival customs, and collective TV viewing cultures, the Gala Show reflects the divergent structure of feeling of different generations and families’ social and technological nostalgia about the technology and cultural formats of television in digital era. The established media tradition to some extent maintains the sense of cultural continuity and particularly anchors a safe zoom particular in nuclear families.