Telling Stories, Saving Families:
Media’s Concern with
Modernization as a Challenge to
Traditional Chinese Family Values
In 1958, China started the so-called Cominunization Campaign in
which people living in the countryside were put in the newly established
People’s Commune throughout the country. During its initial period, the
traditional Chinese family system was under threat. Children were either taken
care of by nurseries or placed in brigades of Little Red Soldiers. Adults were
organized to work together in production teams. All the family members had
their meals in big dining halls. Families were instructed to abandon their
kitchens, and their cooking utensils were collected as scrap metal to raise steel
production. During ten years of tunnoil, the Cultural Revolution Movement,
between 1966 and 1976 (especially from 1966 to 1968), children were
encouraged to stand firm in exposing their parents’ “evil deeds.” Wives divorced
their husbands to draw a line of demarcation between the “enemy” and
themselves. Brothers and sisters debated over the dinner table to defend
Chairman Mao’s “revolutionary line.” Sometimes they attacked each other
because they belonged to different factional organizations. Yet, despite the
destructive impact of the Communization Campaign and the Cultural Revolution
Movement, the family values of the Chinese people remained largely intact.
However, since China started its economic reform and open-door
policy in late 1970s, modernization, rapid economic growth, and Western
influence have posed a tremendous challenge to traditional Chinese family
values and ethics. A higher divorce rate, extramarital relations, bigamy,
domestic violence, and premarital sex have become a grave concern for Chinese
culture where the family is supposed to be the primary social unit. This concern
has been reflected in literature and cultural products in recent years. One of the
most popular cultural products during the last two decades in China is the
multiple-episode television serial, known as TV drama. Focused on storytelling,
these TV dramas are welcomed by television viewers “not as mas terpieces by
great artists but symptomatically in terms of their reflections of modem society”
(Thompson 5).
Storytelling researcher Annette Simmons points out, “A good story
helps you influence the interpretation people give to facts” (51). Good TV
dramas enable people not only to interpret reality but also to reframe their
reality. In this essay, I will investigate the Chinese media’s concern with
declining family values, explain its interpretation of the Chinese cultural norm
of an ideal family, and analyze its efforts in persuading Chinese people to
maintain their cultural traditions in family relations while coping with a