(SCMP) A Chinese government official is caught in bed with a blonde mistress. A communist cadre who stuffs his apartment with banknotes. And a “deputy state-level” leader who ferociously resists a disciplinary probe.
All these were scenes aired to a billion television viewers last week in China’s answer to House of Cards.
Like the American political drama starring Kevin Spacey, the Chinese series, In the Name of The People, proved popular among viewers and critics alike, receiving 170 million views by Tuesday for the first 10 episodes on Iqiyi.com, one of the mainland websites and television channels licensed to broadcast it.
The series is built around fictional internal power plays within the ruling Communist Party as well as the lifestyles of senior officials, although it ultimately hails the anti-corruption campaign of Chinese President Xi Jinping and his key ally, Wang Qishan.
What is extraordinary about the series is that has broken China’s decade-long ban on anti-corruption-themed dramas being aired in prime time slots and it is the first television drama to paint a “deputy state-level” communist leader as a villain.
It doesn’t go as far as House of Cards to feature the president, but it has gone farther than any Chinese political drama to date.
China’s media watchdog decided to curb the genre in 2004 because it exposed excessive details of corruption, even imaginary ones, which Chinese officials thought could undermine public confidence in the ruling party.
The production and broadcasting of In the Name of The People on prime-time screens, therefore, reflects Beijing’s growing confidence that it is able to control the anti-corruption narrative and convince the public that one-party rule can also be clean.
The crackdown on corrupt officials and the incessant calls for party members to be clean has been a hallmark of Xi’s political project in his first five-year term as party general secretary.
Since his ascent to power in late 2012, an estimated 1.2 million officials have been punished for corruption, including the chief of staff of his predecessor Hu Jintao and two vice-chairmen of the Central Military Commission who served together.
In a speech in September 2015 in Seattle, Xi said his fight against “tigers and flies” – big and small players – reflected of the public’s will and was not a political purge.
“There’s no power struggle, nor anything similar to House of Cards,” Xi said.
The party’s disciplinary watchdog under Wang, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), has already made two documentaries hailing the campaign.
While the documentaries were eye-popping – featuring toppled provincial officials tearfully confessing in public – the powerful CCDI is trying to grab the attention of the general public, especially young people who prefer to watch TV dramas online rather than dry political documentaries on state television.
In June 2015, a team from the CCDI propaganda department visited the Film and Television Centre of the Supreme People’s Procuratorate and the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, demanding more anti-corruption TV series and movies to be made, according to Fan Ziwen, a deputy director at the centre, which was a producer of In the Name of The People.
Zhou Meisen, a renowned writer of political novels and dramas, was chosen to write the script.
In an interview with Beijing Daily, Zhou said unlike his previous anti-corruption dramas, the production struggled to find backing from state-owned companies.
Series’ director Li Lu said the big state-owned enterprises were not willing to invest because of the long absence of successful anti-corruption dramas in the market and the sensitivity of the theme.
In the end, the show was bankrolled by five private companies, none of which had invested in a television series before, Li said.
Its portrayal of power groups inside the party, such as “secretary gang” and the “political legal affairs gang”, echo real fallen political factions led by former president Hu Jintao’s disgraced personal secretary Ling Jihua and former Politburo Standing Committe member Zhou Yongkang, one of the country’s most powerful men.
A wall of stacked banknotes reminds the audience of Wei Pengyuan, a former deputy director of the coal department at the National Energy Administration, who hid cardboard boxes brimming with cash stuff underneath a bed mattress in his otherwise empty apartment in Beijing.
Many lines from the drama have found their way into common usage, such as “people toast him not because he is a good person, but because he has power”.
Source: South China Morning Post by Nectar Gan