ABSTRACT
On 30 April 2010, at the opening ceremony of the Shanghai World Expo, Quincy Delight Jones II, the composer of the Expo English theme song, surprised and entertained the Shanghai people with his song, Better City Better Life. Instead of using English for the chorus, the song used a repetition of the Shanghai dialect words for ‘me’ and ‘you’ – ‘al-a-nun’. According to news reports, ‘This might be the first time that the Chinese dialect came into an English song’ (Wang Lei 2010). After the 2010 CCTV Spring Festival Gala (SFG), Donation, a comedy sketch in a Northeastern dialect performed by Zhao Benshan, a popular comic, was awarded first prize for the ‘most popular SFG program’. It was the twelfth time that Zhao got the prize. He performed during the Gala for 20 years, and his sketches have always been very popular. CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala started in 1983, is annually broadcast on Chinese New Year’s Eve, and is watched by millions of Chinese, including diasporic Chinese. This chapter reviews the recent popularity of Chinese dialects in television programs within the context of globalization and China’s national guidelines on language policy. Through interviews with practitioners at Kunming and Yunnan TV stations, it studies the dialect TV phenomenon in terms of local, national and global relationships. The research reveals that global and/or national influences are not only external to the environment of local media but are also important factors in current Chinese local experiences that shape ‘modern’ life within a locality.
