Perspective: Why the Chinese government has blocked the nation’s most popular soap operas
A performer dressed as an emperor, center, participates in a Qing Dynasty ceremony in which emperors prayed for good harvest and fortune at a temple fair in Ditan Park in Beijing on Feb. 5. By Fei-Hsien Wang Fei-Hsien Wang is an assistant professor of history at Indiana University Bloomington. April 8 at 6:00 AM China’s wildly popular soap operas are disappearing.
Why did the soap operas trigger such a dramatic response? Because in China, a television drama about Qianlong is never just a television drama about Qianlong. In a culture with a long tradition of using history to debate the present, historical soap operas are often read as commentaries on the current regime.
For Chinese nationalists of the 1910s, however, he was an arrogant Manchu conqueror. He suppressed the majority Han people with suffocating literary inquisitions and indulged his corrupt administration to suck the country’s thriving economy dry. These early 20th-century revolutionaries used these negative images of Qianlong to remind citizens that Han Chinese were oppressed under his reign and that his refusal to open door to European trade led to the imperialist aggressions in the 19th century.
Now, Qianlong’s reign is styled as the good old days, before Western imperialism brought the so-called a hundred years of national humiliation — military defeats, foreign concessions and economic exploitation. It is remembered as the last glorious age in Chinese history, when the Qing empire was the superpower of the world.
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