28 Reality Talent Shows in China Transnational Format, Affective Engagement, and the Chinese Dream Ling Yang On December 27, 2007, Xinwen Lianbo, the prime-time news program of China’s CCTV Comprehensive Channel (CCTV-1), aired a report about harmful content on the Internet and appealed for timely government actions to purify the online environment. In the report, a 13-year-old schoolgirl from Beijing told a CCTV reporter that she had once seen a “very prurient very violent” (hen huang hen baoli) pop-up advertisement when she was suring on the Internet. Convinced that the girl had been coached by CCTV to tell a lie, angry netizens tracked down her per- sonal information and disclosed it on the Internet for public shaming. The phrase “very prurient very violent” went on to become the most well-known online catch- phrase of 2008, signifying a massive discursive protest against CCTV’s manipulation of reality to cheat its audience. As if in retaliation to CCTV’s stigmatization of the Internet, Chinese netizens have sarcastically renamed the company CCAV (“Central China Adult Video”) because this preeminent mouthpiece of the party-state – that is, a country in which a single political party has exercised absolute control over the state and society – is inclined to create a fantasy of harmony and order on the televi- sion screen that is not dissimilar to the fantasy of male potency in pornographic videos. With the exponential growth of the Internet and other new media technology, the average television-watching time in China has declined from 187 minutes per day in 1998 (Li, 2009) to 168 minutes per day in June 2011 (F. Wu, 2011), even though the number of television sets per household has been steadily increasing. While television is still the most important source of information for people in the countryside, young urban dwellers are increasingly logging onto the Internet for more reliable news and interactive entertainment. When the latter watch television shows and serial dramas, they prefer to watch online so they can share their com- A Companion to Reality Television, First Edition. Edited by Laurie Ouellette. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.