Watching the Spring Festival Gala program is like a brief history of China's social economy slowly unfolding.
Text丨Zhang Qing, Huang Tianyuan.
Edit丨Zhou Jinyu.
On Chinese New Year's Eve 41 years ago, 200 audiences gathered in a studio of less than 600 square meters, and director Huang Yihe took the actors to have a tea party, creating a New Year memory that Chinese will continue to share in the next 40 years - the Spring Festival Gala.
The Spring Festival Gala is a mirror that reflects our lives. Through the stage of the Spring Festival Gala over the years, we relive the common memory.
The Spring Festival Gala also recorded the great changes in China. Since the 80s of the last century, the tide of commodity economy has rolled in, and people have rushed to that "brave new world" to the ebb and flow of the Internet industry. Watching the Spring Festival Gala program is like a brief history of China's social economy slowly unfolding.
Many years later, people think of the first Spring Festival Gala, most of which are black and white memories: black and white pictures, actors and audiences dressed in black, gray, and blue, such as pure joy in black and white. The "Xiaoqing shirt" is an exception.
Since there was no costume procurement fee, the actors and hosts of the Spring Festival Gala that year wore their usual clothes. Actor Liu Xiaoqing became the host of the Spring Festival Gala for the first time, and she wore a red slim lapel shirt that she bought for 5 Hong Kong dollars in Hong Kong's Ladies Market, and became the brightest star of the night. In the crowd of plain tones, the full and bright red and Liu Xiaoqing's bright smile made the "Xiaoqing shirt" a hit in the first generation of the Spring Festival Gala.
In the early 80s of the last century, the valve of the planned economy had just opened, and fashion trend information began to come in from Hong Kong through Guangdong.
39 years later, at the Spring Festival Gala in 2022, ten minutes after actor Zhang Xiaofei appeared in a peacock green velvet coat, he was picked up by the audience in front of the TV, and Zhang Xiaofei's same coat was sold out in 10 minutes and rushed to the hot search. Today, better shopping search tools and real-time interactive social platforms have accelerated the birth of the Spring Festival Gala. The "Queen of Bringing Goods" has been there every year, and the popularity path of "Spring Festival Gala Hit" has always been consistent.
In the crowd of plain tones, the full and bright red and Liu Xiaoqing's bright smile made the "Xiaoqing shirt" a hit of the first generation of the Spring Festival Gala.
Li Wanfen and Zhou Guozhi's sketch "Gift" may be the first satirical sketch to appear on the stage of the Spring Festival Gala. Zhou Guozhi plays a businessman who tries to pay bribes to obtain permission to go to the sea to do business, and visits the four bureau chiefs Zhao, Qian, Sun, and Li with generous gifts. Li Wanfen plays four corners by herself, and each role frustrates Zhou Guozhi's bribery plan.
Zhou Guozhi in the sketch wants to run a private enterprise, and what he needs most is a business license represented by a license. In 1985, the private economy had just opened up, and the first private enterprise license in China was specially approved by ***. When the sketch was on the Spring Festival Gala, the state's regulations on self-employed and private enterprises were still being explored, but when the system was not yet built, there were already people like Zhou Guozhi who were taking advantage of loopholes.
In July 1980, Shanghai was the first batch of 10,000 individual industrial and commercial households. Source: Visual China.
In that period when you could pick up ** everywhere, people fanatically pursued to make a fortune: everything could be commoditized, and everything could be solved with money. From the shift in social thought from the "front" to the "money" to the "front", everyone is rushing towards the "brave new world".
Li Wanfen and Zhou Guozhi's sketch "Gift".
In addition to Jigong and Uncle, Mr. You Benchang also left a classic image on the stage of the Spring Festival Gala. He played Sun Erniang in "Sun Erniang Opens a Shop", and Sun Erniang in the show, under the boom of self-employed people going to the city to do business, recruited talents for Sun Grilla Hotel.
In addition to Sun Erniang, the focus of the show is also the one who failed to successfully compete for the staff of Sun Erniang's hotel in the end and changed his career to be a "fallen master". The so-called "inverted master" is a person who buys and sells goods at a low price and earns the difference. At that time, the country adopted a first-class dual-track system, the planned goods were priced by the state, and the commodities that exceeded the planned increase in production were priced by the market. Mou, who poured four Soviet planes with 500 wagon cans in those years, is a typical representative.
One billion people are 900 million down, and there are still 100 million to seek", which was widely circulated in society at that time. In 1988, the state abolished the first-class dual-track system and liberalized price controls, but the price that had to be paid was that in the late 80s and early 90s, prices soared.
In January 2024, You Benchang (middle), the main creator of the TV series "Flowers", was at a red carpet ceremony. In addition to Jigong and uncle, You Benchang once left a classic image in "Sun Erniang Opens a Shop". Source: Visual China.
If you want to say that in the Spring Festival Gala in 1991, the most resonant thing for the audience has to be the sentence shouted by Jiang Kun, "I heard that the price of non-staple food is going to rise in two days!" ”
Jiang Kun and Tang Jiezhong, the old crosstalk partners, vividly and exaggeratedly depicted the phenomenon of hoarding goods in 1990 in "Anxious": "I am a small cart and a flatbed truck, and I go home to pull oil, salt, sauce and vinegar. vinegar, hit a bath; soy sauce, hit two water tanks; MSG, bought two drawers ......”
At that time, "price **" ran through the lives of the people. In 1988, rice and flour rose by 14%, and meat and eggs increased by 368%, the total increase in food categories is 23%, and the "garlic you ruthless" and "ginger you army" period that appeared every day on TV in 2010 was only an 11% increase.
In September 1988, the Third Plenary Session of the 13th CPC Central Committee decided to focus the next two years on improving the economic environment and rectifying the economic order. As a result of the tightening of fiscal and credit policies, the price index fell rapidly. By 1991, inflation and prices had been basically suppressed, the total supply and demand of society were basically balanced, and commodities had been successfully merged.
cross talk "Anxious", Kun shouted the sentence "I heard that the price of non-staple food is going to rise in two days!" "Resonate with the audience.
In the sketch "Point Company", Niu Qun and Feng Gong played the role of "First Generation" advertising planning and product manager. They came up with the idea of matching the BB machine with a custom ringtone, transforming a single candle into Arabic numerals to solve the candle for the birthday fee of the elderly, and the antidote to the fake drug chaos that everyone hated at that time was "catch it and die".
Not only are the cross talk lines written ruthlessly, but the state's punishment for counterfeit drug cases was indeed so strong back then. In 1994, the economy and wealth had become a major proposition in social life. However, for the lives of ordinary people, the negative impact caused by the commercial wave is as significant as the positive effect it brings, and the problem of counterfeit and shoddy goods is serious to the point of endangering the safety of people's lives.
In the 1993 Zhoukou counterfeit drug case, Wang Zhiqiang conspired with others to produce oxytetracycline for human use, which not only did not meet the sanitary conditions, but only made granules of starch and talcum powder into tablets, or added a small amount of powder. After taking this medicine, many people have delayed** and aggravated their condition. In the same year, the state successively promulgated the "Consumer Rights and Interests Protection" and the "Product Quality Law", marking that the product quality work is no longer barbaric and has finally embarked on the track of legal management.
Niu Qun and Feng Gong were once a pair of ** partners in the Spring Festival Gala. Source: Visual China.
Guo Da and Cai Ming can be said to be the "** old couple" on the stage of the Spring Festival Gala. In the 1996 Spring Festival Gala, the two collaborated on a futuristic sci-fi sketch "Robot Funny Stories". The robot played by Cai Ming was bought home by Guo Da as a custom girlfriend, but the robot that was not smart enough at that time could not meet Guo Da's requirements, so a series of ridiculous plots were generated.
Now that I think about it, wasn't Cai Ming's role at that time exactly the current popular AI robot?
Sci-fi sketch "Robot Funny Stories".
In 1994, China became the 77th country with full access to the Internet. In January 1995, the Telecommunications Bureau opened two nodes in Beijing and Shanghai, and the Internet began to truly enter people's lives. In the same year, Ding Lei of Ningbo Telecommunications Bureau decided to resign and devote himself to the Internet industry, Wang Zhidong got another investment, intending to carry out a comprehensive reorganization of Sitong Lifang, Zhang Chaoyang just graduated from MIT and decided to return to China to start a business, they will be founded in two or three years respectively NetEase, Sina and Sohu, the "Internet Three Musketeers" are assembled, and China's Internet is about to take off.
In December 2017, at the World Internet Conference, Ding Lei of NetEase was the host, and Internet entrepreneurs such as Ma Huateng, Robin Li, and Zhang Chaoyang of Sohu had dinner together. Source: Visual China.
When Zhao Benshan and Gao Xiumin appeared on the stage, the Spring Festival Gala reached a small climax that year, and the applause at the scene once drowned out the applause. This is the 24th program of the party, which debuted at about 10 o'clock in ** time, called "Selling Abduction". Zhao Benshan's "Big Flicker" was stunned for about ten minutes, and Fan Wei, an honest man with healthy legs and feet, was called a lame man, Fan Wei was deceived, and he had to say "thank you" before leaving.
"Selling Abduction" is the most important work in the performance history of Zhao Benshan and Fan Wei, Zhao Benshan's sketches no longer rely on language baggage, and the situational conflict dominates, and finally Fan Wei, a man who has been on the Spring Festival Gala 5 times, is popular. After "Selling Abduction", they collaborated on "Selling Cars" and "Kung Fu", and the "Selling Abduction Trilogy" has become one of the most important memories of the Spring Festival Gala language programs, which has established Zhao Benshan's status as the king of the sketch world, and "flickering" has officially separated from the Northeast dialect and has become a common word in Mandarin.
In an interview afterwards, Zhao Benshan bluntly said that this work was exposing and satirizing social phenomena. If China's reform and opening up is divided into two stages, 2001 is a watershed, at the end of that year, China joined the WTO, began to enjoy the dividends of globalization, superimposed on the dividends of the reform achievements of the previous 20 years, the two dividends allowed China's economy to take off after 2001.
However, in those years, with the vigorous development of the market economy, social problems such as counterfeit and shoddy goods, cheating, abduction, and fraud appeared, and even endangered people's lives. In 2001, "Focus Interview" published 10 major cases of rectifying and regulating the market economic order in the country, and the cases of black-hearted cotton, poisoned rice, and Yuanhua smuggling were among the cases that shocked the whole country, and more than half of the cases involved the food, clothing, housing, use, and safety of the people.
In 2013, in Beijing's 798 Art District, the audience was visiting the gallery exhibition, and on the right was Zhao Benshan's sketch "Selling Abduction". * Visual China.
This year's Spring Festival Gala is still a "stalk machine". "Sledgehammer eighty, small hammer forty" - this line in the sketch "Decoration", in today's words, accurately hits the pain point of the audience who are worried about decoration.
Huang Dazhui, a renovation worker played by Huang Hong, came to the door with a big hammer to smash the wall of Gong Hanlin's 9-story new house, but smashed it across the line and emptied the closet of the neighbor's house. Neighbor Lin Yongjian appeared as a **, speaking "What are you doing" with a Tianjin accent, and left a classic image for the Spring Festival Gala. The story is not over here, it turns out that the smashed house is not on the 9th floor at all, and the homeowner and the decorator have mistaken the house number and smashed the 6th floor by mistake.
Nowadays, people have become more and more experienced in decoration "avoiding pits", and in 2005, for many people who have just bought a house, decoration is really a "happy trouble". The source of the creation of this sketch is Huang Hong's own decoration experience.
From 1998 to 2007, the real estate industry entered the "first era" of high growth and high returns. In the past decade, China's economy has grown at an average rate of 12%, urbanization has accelerated, and the average growth rate of commercial housing sales area has reached 20%, and real estate has become the main force driving economic growth.
Decoration discussed the chaos in the renovation industry, and by 2008, the Spring Festival Gala sketches "Dream Home" and "Unlocking" sharply satirized the false propaganda of developers and the inaction of property companies. With the improvement of people's living standards, the demand for the improvement of the living environment continues to grow, and housing has become a permanent topic on the stage of the Spring Festival Gala during this period.
Sketch "Decoration". After 1998, real estate ushered in the first decade, and housing became a permanent topic on the stage of the Spring Festival Gala during this period.
This is the first time that the Internet has tested the waters in the Spring Festival Gala. According to the statistics of careful netizens, Robin Li's photogenic times reached 8 times. Among the entrepreneurs who appeared on camera that year, Robin Li was the first to appear on camera, about 5 minutes after the start of the Spring Festival Gala. After that, the camera will stay on his smiling face for a few seconds from time to time.
In addition to "making" Robin Li's appearance, he also won the advertising of the ** period before the official start of the Spring Festival Gala, and took the lead in greeting the people of the whole country for the New Year.
From its establishment in 2000 to its landing on the NASDAQ in 2005, it has been pushed to the "highlight" moment of history with products such as search, post bar, and encyclopedia. At the same time, from the portal era of Sina, Sohu and NetEase to the BAT era of Alibaba and Tencent, the entire Chinese Internet industry is undergoing an important turn.
With Google's full exit, Robin Li's won a decisive victory in 2009. Fortune magazine writes: A few years ago, it was considered a copycat, but now, with a 75% market share, it has become the absolute ruler of the Chinese search market.
That year, the number of Internet users in China reached 38.4 billion, more than the United States and Japan combined, ranking first in the world. The revenue of China's Internet economy reached 74.3 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 307%, much higher than the growth rate of about 8% of China's economy, has become a bright color of China's industrial development.
Two years after the Spring Festival Gala, in March 2011, the market value reached US$48.1 billion, surpassing Tencent to become the most valuable Chinese Internet company at that time.
In 2009, Robin Li appeared at the Spring Festival Gala. This is the first time that the Internet has tested the waters in the Spring Festival Gala. According to statistics from netizens, Robin Li's photogenic times have reached 8 times.
The Little Tigers reorganized and Faye Wong made a comeback, and the Spring Festival Gala in 2010 brought out the youthful memories of many people. This year, of the households in the country that watched TV, there were 961% of households watched the Spring Festival Gala, Sina, Sohu, Tencent, etc. broadcast the Spring Festival Gala live for the first time, and the number of people through the Internet ** Spring Festival Gala also reached 78.5 million.
Under the huge ratings, the "money road" of the Spring Festival Gala has attracted more and more attention. That year, there were 26 manufacturers advertising in the Spring Festival Gala, hard advertising, soft advertising and product placement advertising took turns, FMCG, home appliances, communications and finance, the number of advertisements was comparable.
In Liu Qian's magic performance, Huiyuan juice's strength stole the show, and netizens complained that "the appearance time is longer than Dong Qing". In the 20-minute sketch "Donation", advertisements for Sohu, Sogou, Sanya Tourism, and Guojiao 1573 appeared in turn. According to ** reports at the time, the advertising placement fee for this sketch alone reached 12 million yuan. The overall advertising revenue of the Spring Festival Gala is more than 6500 million, and the commercial invasion reached a "peak".
In 2010, the commercial invasion of the Spring Festival Gala reached a "peak", and netizens' antipathy to product placement seemed to have reached its peak.
In 2010, China's economy continued to grow at a high rate. This year, China's GDP growth rate was as high as 106%, and the total economic output reached 413 trillion yuan, surpassing Japan for the first time to become the world's second largest economy.
The Spring Festival Gala in 2010 seems to have also brought netizens' antipathy to product placement to its peak. In 2011, the Spring Festival Gala began to enter the era of "zero placement" advertising. However, the era of mobile Internet is coming, and traffic will be more violently promoted in another way.
Tencent got the new ** interaction right of the Spring Festival Gala with 53.03 million yuan, and in the Chinese New Year's Eve, people sat in front of the TV, opened WeChat and shook it, "clicking" to grab the red envelope, which became a "new posture" for the New Year.
Tencent distributed 500 million yuan in red envelopes to the Spring Festival Gala that year, a new measure that marked China's entry into the era of national mobile Internet, and the Spring Festival Gala entered the cross-screen era of socialization, interaction and active participation from the era of passive viewing.
It was also from this year that the prelude to the decisive battle of the Internet giants for the Spring Festival Gala began. Since then, Ali, Kuaishou, Douyin, and Jingdong have taken turns on the stage of the Spring Festival Gala and handed out red envelopes on Chinese New Year's Eve. The market capitalization of Chinese internet companies continues to grow. Internet companies had the money and the incentive to sponsor the Spring Festival Gala, and at that time, China's population was an increase in users for them, and it was an imaginary space for valuation.
In 2018, the growth of Internet users has reached a turning point, and the traffic battle for mobile Internet has become a zero-sum game. Under the pressure of growth, Alibaba and Tencent chose to shift some of their businesses to cloud computing. Internet companies have entered the stage of technology-driven business.
WeChat has become one of the protagonists of the 2015 Spring Festival Gala, and it is also from this year that the prelude to the decisive battle of the Internet giants for the Spring Festival Gala has begun.
Compared with the relaxation brought by the Spring Festival Gala in the past, the Spring Festival Gala in 2021 may make many parents "break the defense", make many children nervous, and make ** educational institutions crazy.
At the Spring Festival Gala scene, the host mentioned ape counseling four times, and it also carried out brand implantation in the Spring Festival Gala sketch "Balcony", actors Tong Dawei and Wang Likun played a teacher's family in the sketch, and on the balcony of their house, there was an alphabet, and below the alphabet was the name and logo of ape counseling.
The Spring Festival Gala was a microcosm of that year's best education marketing. In the summer vacation of 2020 alone, the four institutions of Ape Tutoring, Xueersi Online School, Homework Help, and Who to Learn from spent 1.5 billion yuan, 1.2 billion yuan, 1 billion yuan, and 800 million yuan respectively on summer marketing promotion, and the annual marketing expenditure of Gaotu, which is mainly engaged in K12 education, skyrocketed by 4588%。
After the epidemic hit in 2020, the world's investment flocked to China's first-class education track. In 2020, the financing amount of China's ** education industry exceeded 50 billion yuan, exceeding the total financing of the industry in the previous ten years. However, the funds were only absorbed by the head, and small and medium-sized institutions could only survive the winter in a low-key manner in the face of the sharply speculated traffic.
The Spring Festival Gala of that year is a microcosm of the ** education marketing in 2020. In the sketch "Balcony", Ape Counseling carried out brand placement.
If you choose a Spring Festival Gala melody, there is no doubt that it will be "Unforgettable Tonight". As the repertoire and finale song of the Spring Festival Gala, since 1983, Chinese audiences have not heard this song for two years, once in 1983, when the song was not yet born; Another time was in 2012, "Unforgettable Tonight" was not sung at the Spring Festival Gala.
There is a significant change in "Unforgettable Tonight" in the 2023 Spring Festival Gala, the original singer Li Guyi was absent due to the new crown illness, and the singer became "all actors". The topic "There is no Li Guyi in this year's Spring Festival Gala" was once on the hot search.
The Spring Festival Gala director team once revealed that "Unforgettable Tonight" without Li Guyi had fallen into a dilemma, from December 23 to Chinese New Year's Eve, "Unforgettable Tonight" went through a total of 17 versions, and finally presented later works.
This is a children's version of "Unforgettable Tonight", and the children who sang this song appeared at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Winter Olympics a year ago. The children's singing voices are ethereal and warm, with rolling green hills and pairs of swallows in the background.
For countless Chinese, every time this song "Unforgettable Tonight" sounds, it means that the new year has really come. "No matter whether new friends and old friends come to invite each other again next spring." This is the promise of spring.
Happy New Year to all!
There is a significant change in the 2023 Spring Festival Gala's "Unforgettable Tonight", the original singer Li Guyi is absent, and the singer becomes "all actors".
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A Brief History of New China's Economy" series of programs, updated from the up master of station b "Happy Wangzai 24";
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