Sunday was Chinese New Year’s Day. CCTV, the state TV network in mainland China, marked the event as usual with an entertainment extravaganza, the highlight being a five-hour “Spring Festival Gala.” on Saturday night, New Year’s Eve. This is one of the most-watched programs in the world, estimates of worldwide viewership in the range of 800 million to a billion.

You can watch the show in North America on the CCTV international channel. We passed on it, preferring to spend the evening entertaining friends, but a correspondent in China sent me this report.

This year’s shows, apart from their entertainment function, seemed to have a higher than usual component of communist and nationalist propaganda.
One segment near the end of the gala highlighted half a dozen chubby and rosy-faced teenagers of the [Communist Party] “Young Pioneers” wearing the emblematic and conspicuous red scarves, standing shoulder by shoulder together with three teachers, and singing in unison, lauding the “great and glorious Communist Party of China under whose infallible leadership and guidance our mission of building a new and powerful China would be totally inconceivable.” (Those were the actual words of the song.)
Another scene showed large pictures in chronological order of the so-called four generations of the supreme leadership of the new China, stressing their fatherly kindness and concern for the common people of China. The four pictures featured Mao Tse-tung, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and current president Hu Jintao.
In addition to all this pompously self-important and self-congratulatory posturing, the New Year programming also had a more than usually anti-American slant. One show, a comedy-drama, featured a Chinese farmer who had donated a big amount of money to a poor family — a single mother supporting a college-student son. The farmer proudly declared to his family and a news reporter interviewing him: “Everybody needs the help of others! It should be given without hesitation. Nobody can stay in a state of affluence throughout a whole lifetime, right?” He continued sarcastically: “See, even those proud, arrogant Americans have to come to our China to borrow money from us nowadays!”

So now you know where the Family Guy writers get their inspiration from.