Look this way, young ones
On October 18 last year when the final competition of Dictation Assembly was broadcast, the audience rating for the program reached 2.59 percent, beating many other programs over the whole week. Despite this, an obvious limit to the program is its target audience, who are mostly middle and high school students - it fails to garner attention from young adults, who are considered a key force in maintaining cultural continuity.
Realizing this limitation, TV producers have this year developed several new programs, such as Chinese Idioms Congress by CCTV and Idioms Hero by Henan TV and iqiyi.com, both of which expanded their demographics of contestants beyond high-school students, especially Chinese Idioms Congress, which attempted to target college students and white-collar workers.
However, the reception for those programs did not go as well. Compared to the influence of Dictation Assembly after it was first broadcast, both Chinese Idioms Congress and Idioms Hero seem a little overshadowed. Maybe young people today are too busy focusing on careers and worrying how to pay their debts to fret too much about which radical goes where. Idioms like Hai kuo tian kong, literally meaning "unrestrained and far-ranging" but similar to "The sky's the limit" in English, are also much less a part of day-to-day life than writing characters.
According to figures provided by the CCTV Development and Research Center, the total viewership for Dictation Assembly was 670 million, as opposed to 559 million for Chinese Idioms Congress. Sponsorship for Dictation Assembly soared to 126 million yuan ($20 million) for its second season.
Still, compared to entertainment shows like Voice of China, the audience ratings are less reassuring. A quick Baidu search reveals their relative value: 65.5 million search results for Voice of China (compared to 84.7 million for the breakout reality show Where Are We Going, Dad?) but only 15.8 million for Chinese Idioms Congress.
Encouraged and protected
The insufficiencies of Chinese character spelling and "idiom contest" programs are obvious: They both suffer from generic formulae (even sharing the same rules, including gesticulations and guesswork); are rarely able to showcase interesting contestants, who can help boost the profile of a show beyond a traditional audience by sparking online conversation; practice an overarching focus on learning the characters, as opposed to their cultural heritage; and have a lack of interesting judges or guests. These are just some of the problems.
But when wrongly written words or mispronounced characters become commonplace, the ability to understand rare and historically-valued literature is degenerating and imitating foreign entertainment programs has become the norm, original cultural programs are precious and need to be protected.
As President Xi Jinping once declared: "Let those words in ancient books become alive again." Indeed, this is the actual slogan for the second season of Dictation Assembly; the country's leaders have more than once stressed the importance of cultural renaissance to the revival of the country.
When the mission undertaken by these programs is elevated to such a height, they are injected with a new energy. Dictation Assembly has mobilized nearly 12 million students across the country to participate in spelling contests, with more than 30,000 middle schools holding regional heats to choose contestants. Only 180 students may make the final grade on the TV screen - but it seems that increasing numbers of their viewers are seeing the benefits of good spelling, too.
We Recommend:
Print
Save