What do you get when you combine a mainland tour by a Taiwanese pop icon with a roomful of propaganda officials who want to put their own stamp on policy? You get, possibly, a catchy new buzzword for state controls on the news, arts and culture.
As we saw last month at the Chinese Communist Party’s forum on arts and culture, President Xi Jinping is all about “positive energy” in media and culture. He told artists gathered at the event that works of art and literature “should be like sunshine, blue sky and the spring breeze, inspiring minds, warming hearts and cultivating taste.” Cultural creation, said Xi, should brim with “positive energy,” or zhengnengliang (正能量), which refers to positive and uplifting content and attitudes as opposed to critical and negative ones.
At the forum, speeches were given by representatives from various media in Hanzhong, talking about the results achieved over the past year. Hanzhong Party Committee Member and Propaganda Minister Xie Jingshuai (谢京帅) pointed out that media must have a correct grasp of public opinion guidance (准确把握好舆论导向), and transmit positive energy to society (传播社会正能量).
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Concerning future media development, Xie Jingshuai said he hoped that media could correctly grasp public opinion guidance, respect the facts, have a keen eye for discovering beautiful things (拥有发现美的敏锐眼光), have the courage to bear [their responsibilities], that they report beauty, spread beauty and transmit positive energy to society (报道美、传播美,传递社会正能量).
You can easily see Lo Ta-yu’s desire to use the concerts to transmit positive energy to society, and this is why he is still called ‘the godfather of Chinese pop.’
In the decade prior to that coverage, there is nothing anywhere in mainland news coverage about “transmitting positive energy to society.”
Lo is a widely recognised cultural icon in Taiwan, mainland China and Hong Kong — though his simple and melodic songs have sometimes contained social and political commentary, and in the 1980s there were bans on some of his songs in Taiwan and the PRC. [There is an interesting piece here, with English translation, about a Lo tune called “Orphan of Asia.”]
More recently, Lo sparked some controversy during Taiwan’s “Sunflower Movement” protests earlier this year, when he called student protesters “victims of mass hysteria.”
Was Lo Ta-yu’s 2011 mainland concert tour the inspiration for the emerging propaganda notion of “transmitting positive energy to society”? It’s difficult to say for sure. But it is certainly possible. After all, as propaganda officials know only too well, culture moves in mysterious ways.
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