Chinese Bridge 2016

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What was it that endeared me to “Chinese Bridge”? Was it the sparkling lights, the neon plastic chairs, the game-show ambience? Was it the giant globe and revolving stage built in a week for 72 unwitting “lao wai”’s to walk across? Or perhaps it was the promises of fame and glory poured into our ears as they worked us like dogs—big, cute, hairy foreign dogs—to fabricate a product (nothing other than our own image) that would sell on one of China’s main television stations—CCTV?

Ah, these things were stirring enough, but what captured my heart in the end was something not even my inner cynic could have forecasted for this year’s “Chinese Bridge Chinese Proficiency Competition for Foreigners Across the Globe.” What won me over was that the so-called “competition” was a fake and a sham to the core, that the “ level playing field” we dressed-up, made-up, fed-up foreigners were being paraded across was not just not level, but bent violently and purposefully toward anything that might earn CCTV a scotch higher television ratings. I expected fakery, but I did not expect fraud, and that was exactly what this competition was: a rigged show, with outcomes planned from the beginning, and us foreigners to play the role of lively, dumb pawns on the Chinese TV chessboard.

Ah, such is to be expected of the television world—not just in China but in any country I’d imagine—and I am ashamed to have expected anything to the contrary. But it is particularly unfortunate, because "Chinese Bridge" is a perfect example of New China devouring its own culture and spoiling its image in the eyes of foreigners for the sake of an extra buck. I wish I didn’t have to write this—for I do truly love and admire China—but something about a first-hand ride through the sticky innards of a beast like this leaves me no choice but to shake up the ink bottle and get a-cleanin’. As for the make-up, hair-spray and neon sludge that gets washed off into a pool around me: I hope readers can take note of this queer phenomenon, for what it says about China, what it says about TV and what it says about the real value of an experience like this.

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I had learned pretty early on in my time studying Chinese in Fuzhou about the annual ‘Chinese Bridge’ competition, knew at least that it was the biggest competition in China to test foreigners’ proficiency in Mandarin, and knew that its rewards were lucrative (a student from our university had actually won it before, and in addition to a hefty check, got an offer from Beijing University. When she came back to our school after the competition was over, faculty and staff literally formed a line to greet and congratulate her, shaking her hand as she walked in honor up the school steps). My Chinese is descent (and I’m a white American), so it wasn’t long before teachers began encouraging me to participate. I signed up, figuring that it was at least a chance to meet other students studying Chinese, or get a free trip to Beijing. Plus, just signing up would give me the chance to take classes specially organized by the school to review different aspects of traditional Chinese culture, subjects we may not have encountered in our normal classes, but which may well have come up in the competition.

The classes, led under our school's Professor Chen, were good. We went over traditional Chinese stories, idioms, music forms—all based on the kind of material that had appeared in the competition in previous years. As the semester drew to a close, the first round of the competition was quickly upon us: submitting a video introducing oneself, and then participating in an online interview. I shot the video with a classmate in the front yard of the house I rent. As for the interview, ten minutes of nervous but passably fluent Chinese apparently showed well with the selection committee. A few days later, our school was notified that one of the five contestants from Fujian Normal had been chosen to go to Beijing: yours truly. I was happy, but far from ecstatic, for even at that point I had a sneaking suspicion that Chinese Bridge, despite all the hype, was only nominally a "Chinese proficiency competition." I would indeed see such words on the competition grounds, but they’d be plastered high and wide on a decadent revolving globe, with left-over silicone strands squeezed out under slightly crooked letters, looking just official and real enough to be consumed without second thought by a Chinese television audience. One close look and the letters—like the idea they represented—were just a space-filler, a superficial nod. Whatever suspicions I harbored from the outset would not just be confirmed, but, so I found out, wildly exceeded.

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The 2016 Chinese Bridge competition featured 72 contestants from 12 different competition districts across the globe; six districts from within China, six from outside China. Chinese Bridge flew us out to Beijing, and put us up in the capital's "Media Park" (北京东亿国际传媒产业园)，a cluster of university and office buildings all constructed with a boxy black and red modern art flavor. The hotel was nice—luxurious, even, compared to my ramshackle quarters down south. Unlimited hot water and daily tidying—these I could hardly complain about after months of faucet-showers in Fuzhou.



I met my team members at the hotel. As it turned out, the first half of the competition would team-themed, with each competition district representing one team. Our team members came from America, Korea, Tajikistan, Indonesia, Estonia and Vietnam. Since we all go to school in southern China, together we represented the “Guangzhou competition district.” Within a minute of meeting my comrades one thing was perfectly clear to me: if Chinese proficiency was the benchmark for this competition, at least three members of our group more than met the grade. The young Korean lady was Korean indeed in ethnicity and nationality, but has been studying in China since the third grade—her Chinese was expectedly awesome. The Indonesian has been living in China for several years himself and has an absolute knack for Chinese accents and dialects; his voice was nearly indistinguishable from a Northern Chinese accent. And the Vietnamese man was the oldest (27 years old) and probably the brightest among us, fluent in Mandarin and very knowledgeable about Asian and particularly Chinese culture. The other three of us had good Mandarin, but had not been studying for as long as our adept peers. Nonetheless, when it came to overall Mandarin skill and knowledge of Chinese culture, it was clear our team would likely be a serious contender.



We landed in Beijing on the 28^th of June; filming didn’t start until the 3^rd of July. This meant that Chinese Bridge had five days to take 70 plus young Chinese scholars and turn them into marketable, entertaining TV material—a task easier said than done. From the minute we arrived at the hotel, they had our noses to the grindstone: writing skits, practicing our chosen “talent,” reviewing Chinese traditional culture trivia. There were three one to two hour meetings a day with special directors responsible for steering our ideas into presentable items for the TV audience and given time restrictions. Captaining us to and fro the cafeteria, hotel rooms and rehearsal studios was Mr. Mo, our young team leader from Guangzhou especially assigned to brief us and take care of us throughout the competition. Mr. Mo went over and above his job to support us and keep us in the know, but soon even he was helpless against the avalanche of to-do’s. For whatever reasons higher up in the CCTV bureaucratic ladder, this year’s competition was exceedingly disorganized: last minute notices and changes became the norm, and both we and our team leader were stressed out and losing sleep from the first day on. In truth, it seemed much less like preparing to compete, and much more simply like working for CCTV to help them put a program together, meanwhile getting compensated with free lodging, food, and the promise of X amount of screen time.



But the truth is we were willing prey. We knew on some level coming in that there would “training,” and that a host of superficialities would accompany the whole venture, but Chinese Bridge was nonetheless offering a platform, a global platform on which to display one’s skill and prove oneself before an audience. We jumped through a hundred hoops, but the truth is we probably would have been willing to jump through a hundred more, because down at the end they were dangling a carrot that seemed to legitimize the whole effort: a chance to be recognized for one’s skill and one’s efforts. This chance to prove oneself is the core of any competition; the larger the competition the bigger the opportunity, and Chinese Bridge, film crew or not, is the biggest stage in the world for university students to perform on.



The Day of the Competition



At 2:30 in the afternoon July 4^th, cameras began rolling, and 24 of us mic-ed and uniformed contestants ran on stage to greet the TV audience and judges. They split the opening games into three day; each day four teams would compete against one another. That day, the four teams that ran on stage included: Oceania, the Americas, Xi’an, and us, Guangzhou. After opening remarks from the two MC’s, we took our places behind 24 small plastic podiums colored according to our team uniforms. Some 180 audience members sat on stands erected on both sides of the room. In front of us were three judges: a famous female news anchor, a well-known professor, and a famous violinist, all Chinese. They sat in oversized red chairs with ipads and papers shuffled in front of them, American idol style.

Giant screens placed on three sides of the studio launched into intro-montages of each of the teams, using footage that the filming crew had collected during the previous several days. At the end of each video, we were prompted by the MCs to yell out our names and chant our “team motto” (万邦艺耀羊城情，世界舞台任我行). Then the games began.

The competition was split into three rounds: a skit performance, trivia, and a talent show（故事会，知识会，才艺会）. The skits were all based on classic stories and parables from Chinese literature. We had five minutes to communicate the basic message of the stories in an accurate and entertaining fashion. They furnished us with props, costumes and sound effects, and after each performance finished, contestants stood on stage to get the run down from news lady, professor and violinist. Our team performed well enough (though I couldn’t forgive myself for forgetting a line!), and by the end of the first round we were short of first place by a mere .9 points.

But out of 180 possible points for the first round, .9 points was nothing. In fact the difference between the first place team and last place team was no more than 15 points, proving not that the competition was tight, but that the judges were not wont to provide very high or very low scores to begin with. After all, what was there to really critique? For the past five days every team had been under the personal guidance of professional directors whose exact job was to make sure we had something presentable for the judges. If we didn’t have something audience members and judges would find acceptable, they wouldn’t have let us go on stage in the first place. Inevitably, the overall scores they gave for each of teams ended up hovering around an “8/10” B average, with any small point differences attributable to the judges own subjective opinions. The kind of dramatic point differences appropriate for a TV audience would have to be decided in the following round.

If the games hadn’t featured a trivia round, and if the trivia round hadn’t been conducted in the following fashion, I probably wouldn’t be writing this in the first place. But trivia was the crux of the whole competition, and the single most important part of trivia was the so-called “lighting round”（抢答题）. At first the game seemed simple enough: all the teams would be asked a multiple choice question, and after the MC yelled “Go!,” each contestant could hit the big red button on the podium in front of them. Whoever hit the button first could respond to the question. A correct answer would add 18 points, an incorrect answer subtract 18 points.

The issue, however, is that the only benchmark for when contestants could start hitting the button was when the MC opened his mouth and said “start.” Who can deny that there is a good measure of subjectivity regarding when exactly that word leaves his mouth and button-hitting becomes legal? To be fair, if contestants were caught hitting the button before he said “start,” they would be punished by not being able to answer that question at all. Nonetheless, what the point-rich lightning round very quickly degenerated into was a button-mashing fest. Because contestants could respond to questions as a team, each person ended up vying to hit the button regardless if he or she knew the answer to the question or not. Chances were someone on the team knew. The “lightning round” became a test for whose arm was quickest, and not for who knew the most trivia.

Honestly, even this level of game show gimmickry was expectable. But as the round progressed, our team became steadily more flabbergasted. Out of 15 questions asked during the lightning round, we managed to clinch only one—the very first one. We knew every question, we button-mashed every question, but virtually every question was awarded to other groups. Feasible? I suppose. Nonetheless, by the end of the day, the conclusion among our team, including our team leader, was that something more was going on than mere game show antics.

It was suspicious enough that our team had six people hammering six buttons for 14 points straight with no results. But add to this the fact that on at least two occasions, one member of our group purposefully hit the button before the MC said “start” and still yielded no reaction, not even a penalty, and things begin to look fishy. Next, consider the fact that the team who won the most opportunities to respond to questions was by far the most loved by the camera throughout that whole day of competition: team Oceania. Team Oceania was six tall handsome white males, one them a model and actor by trade. Their Chinese was not the best (in all honesty it was probably worst out of the four teams), but they were lively, charming and attractive. Our team, on the other hand, probably had the best Chinese between the four teams, but the three competitors with the strongest Mandarin were also the three competitors who looked the most Chinese, with the Indonesian being plainly of Chinese descent. Our team, taken on the whole, looked like Chinese people, spoke like Chinese people, and to an audience eager to see foreign faces and foreign accentsact on stage, might as well have been Chinese people. Our screen time that day was probably the lowest; Oceania, definitely the highest.

When the lightning round ended, Oceania had a commanding lead on the three other teams; meanwhile, Guangzhou was behind even the 3^rd place team by several dozen points. We performed well during the talent round, but it was useless: we got last place that day, and were promptly eliminated from the competition. Taking the news back to the hotel, other teams were surprised to hear about our abrupt defeat, and even more surprised to hear that it was the six studs from Oceania that clinched first.

The other two days of competition told similar stories: the teams that won the most opportunities to respond to questions were also the ones whose image and identity was most strategically important for Chinese Bridge’s success as a television show. And it wasn’t just the lightning round that betrayed suspicions. The very last opportunity to win points at the end of each day of competition was the so-called “audience vote.” Audience members were given a remote and asked to cast a one-point vote for their favorite team. At the end of the vote, points would be digitally tallied and displayed on the big screen for everybody to see. The issue, as one of the other team leaders observantly pointed out, is that the total number of votes on screen—if actually added up—did not match the amount of people purportedly in the audience. Add to this the fact that one of our team members sat in the audience a few days after we were eliminated and, with four or five other people, purposefully did not cast any vote. Mysteriously, their votes were still factored into the tally. Audience members could indeed enter whatever team they wanted into their remote, but whether or not this vote actually influenced what appeared on the big screen is another story. Between the lightning round and audience vote, the six teams who made it through the first round and into the semi-finals looked very neat and balanced indeed: three lively teams from within China, and three teams from outside of China: Africa, Asia, and Oceania (black, yellow, white). Producers and investors in this year’s Chinese Bridge could take a breath. The contestants to make it to the semi-finals may or may not have had the best Chinese, but they were, and had likely been guaranteed to be, the most TV friendly.

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Team Guangzhou was knocked out in the first round along with two other teams. In the following days we got to hang out and play in Beijing, eating free food and going where we pleased. The chemistry between our various team members was positive and lively. Together, we went to Tiananmen square, the Wangfujing shopping district and even the Great Wall (unexpectedly, Chinese Bridge gave us a free ride there!…though the entrance ticket we still had to pay ourselves). All in all being eliminated early really was not so bad. In fact, escaping the pressure of the competition and relaxing for free in the nation’s capital was enough to make us feel quite lucky. But looking back on the competition itself, I am somewhat dismayed to conclude that Chinese Bridge, the largest Chinese Proficiency Competition for Foreigners Across the Globe, is little more than a joke, and in some ways, a really poor one at that.

Is there any perfectly damning evidence to prove that the show was rigged? No, but it’s a strong bet. Imagine you are producing this year’s competition. You can throw all the money you want at famous judges and revolving stage-globes, but you know in the end that 100 judges can’t outshine your most precious resource: foreign faces with Chinese sounds coming out of them on stage. This is the crux of your show; the apple in the eye of expectant TV viewers; it is the only thing that will stop your average Chinese person’s thumb as they flip through endless channels at nine o’clock at night looking for something to watch. Foreign face speaking Chinese sounds is the magnetic joining of alien and familiar, East and West, traditional and modern—it’s a match made in heaven, sure to do well in ratings and line your pocket-books, as long as you can avoid one not-so-ideal outcome: an all Asian final. Chinese-looking, Chinese-sounding foreigners standing on stage for a Chinese audience: this is not the grotesque beauty that will captivate hungry viewers; it is the bane of good TV: it is commonplace. Chinese television viewers watch Chinese Bridge not to see suspiciously Chinese Asians with impeccable Mandarin; they watch it to see gargantuan white man A and pretty white maiden B dance across stage while speaking Mandarin with an accent. And so you as producer get to make a choice: you can either throw up your hands and let competitors compete freely (as any true competition would do, of course), and thus boring your audience with image-deficient contestants; or, spend a few dollars placing an insurance policy on your several million dollar investment, and get the gargantuan A, maiden B final all are hankering for. The answer, if you asked me is clear: press a button, rig the show.

Going in, I, and I imagine a good deal of other contestants, were naïve enough to think we were coming as competitors. Wrong—we were coming as characters. And the organizers of Chinese Bridge were not so much coaches or umpires or referees, as directors. And don’t think it strange if we lost so dramatically to Oceania that day, because it is an age-old rule that characters on a show must be split cleanly into protagonists and supporting roles. What director wouldn’t ask the six Oceania studs to fill up stage center, and be the white-knight heroes of the day? We were Oceania’s fall guy, and once we fulfilled our task of complementing their spotlight, we could be shuffled out.

The results of that day of competition are, in retrospect, not terribly surprising. Sadly, if such results were indeed planned or at least influenced, it means that Chinese Bridge lied to and took advantage of the very individuals who have expended the most time and effort exploring Chinese culture and learning Mandarin. Our efforts through every step of the competition were sincere, and yet Chinese Bridge failed to reciprocate with the most fundamental of provisions: a level playing field. They gathered us together, worked us, got our faces on camera and then quietly fixed us into the roles that would be most suitable for their ratings—all competitive integrity thrown out the window. And now, what will alienated contestants returning to their home countries have to share with friends and family, except: “well Ma, it was fun, and wow—that stage! But I’m not sure what we were doing there had anything to do with Chinese.” Chinese Bridge, being neither truly about Chinese, nor about building a bridge between foreigners and Chinese culture, reveals that new and growing China has enough money to pay lip service to the idea of welcoming foreigners and spreading cultural and literary fluency, but not enough money to actually follow through with it.

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Do I regret having participated in this year’s Chinese Bridge? Not in the least. Would I ever do it again? Not a chance. It has been an honor to come to Beijing and compete, but not because of anything to do with the competition itself. The greatest fruit to come out of the past several days has by far been being able to meet my teammates： 李娴娜，法路忠，艾立岚，廖俊宪，武文勋，and of course our team leader: Mr. Mo (莫克翟）. We learned a lot about one another and about Chinese in two weeks, and the friendship formed after long days working together, eating together, complaining together and traveling together was remarkably tight. I consider myself lucky.

Of course, there is no denying the material comfort of getting to stay in Beijing for free for two solid weeks. I took it upon myself to enjoy some extra long, extra hot showers at the hotel—sometimes two a day—comforted in a deep way by the knowledge that it was on Chinese Bridge’s budget.

Would I recommend Chinese Bridge to next year’s potential competitors? It has been quite the experience, with new things learned, new motivations to study, and new friends to keep in touch with. Then again, the charade of being paraded across a screen for the mere purpose of satisfying a TV audience and meeting expected ratings is shameless and sickening indeed. If you do come, come with all eyes and all ears, and come prepared…not just for language and culture, but a whole slice of our modern society’s self-inflicted insanity—Chinese-style.

It’s a hell of a ride.

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