1994: The Best and Worst of Times

Translated from here:

In 1994, at the age of twenty-five, Faye Wong performed multiple concerts in Hung Hom. In that year, she was questioned by a reporter, “What is your greatest concern at the moment?” After hearing the question clearly, she grinned down with the modesty and self-congratulation of a twenty-five-year-old lady and responded, “I suppose my biggest concern is that I am now too popular.”

During the practice for that year’s Spring Festival Gala, Faye Wong was dismissed for failing to live singing effect. Lang Kun, who assumed his new position as director of the Spring Festival Gala that year, was almost harsh in his demands for the gala’s real stage effects, not only emphasizing the importance of real singing, but also changing the form of playing music with accompaniment to live band accompaniment. At the New Year’s Eve gala, Ma Junren and his coached long-distance running team were headed by the melodic professional Huang Hong, who was awash in acclaim. The reportedly “unique secret recipe of the Ma army” of life nuclear energy oral liquid is much sought after in the real world. This year, the health care and diet pill industries flourished, and the popularity of “Sun God Oral Liquid” shook all of South China and spread north of the Yellow River, becoming a new standard for self-employed individuals across the country to aspire to, like a carp in a river. With the rise of the economy, the physiologic needs of mainland city and town dwellers have increased above subsistence levels.

Teresa Teng, who was then retired, was also invited to the Spring Festival Gala, but she refused. In the 1980s, Teresa Teng’s songs introduced mainland youth to a new universe, and Faye Wong’s 1985 debut album “Where Does the Wind Come From” featured cover versions of Teng’s songs. Obviously, Faye Wong’s exclusion from the 1994 Spring Festival Gala guest list did not prevent her from reaching the height of her career. The mainland is already attempting to reverse the cultural export to Hong Kong and Taiwan that year. He Yong stood on the Hung Hom stage in the cold and yelled, “O Hong Kong women, are you beautiful?” Due to the “Four Kings are clowns” mistake, the impression he had lost in the harsh Hong Kong media was slightly mitigated by his performance alongside Dou Wei and Zhang Chu, who played on the same stage. In the same year, Faye Wong, who was in a relationship with Dou Wei, released a new album in Taiwan under the name “Wang Jingwen” that sold about a million copies, and the song “I Do” became popular and was recorded by notable artists such as Qi Qin and Fei Yuqin.

While cultural and artistic interactions across Taiwan and mainland China are flourishing, shadows are proliferating in the corner. More than twenty Taiwanese tourists were murdered by bandits on a cruise ship on Qiandao Lake in Hangzhou’s western suburbs in March 1994. This heinous episode placed a pall over cross-strait relations, and Taiwanese attitudes toward the mainland cooled significantly, according to polls. Although the mainland side felt aggrieved by this, stating that it was a straightforward criminal matter, the episode was an objective representation of the mainland’s malfunctioning social security in the mid-1990s. The Ministry of Public Security reported that 740,000 cases were opened that year, including 270,000 significant cases, a stunning 20.1% rise over 1993. On August 12, the Ministry of Public Security announced the formation of the Office of Strict Crackdown, which is a repetition of the scary 1980s-era campaign-style law enforcement.

In the summer of the same year, Faye Wong played alongside Tony Leung and Takeshi Kaneshiro in Chongqing Forest, a Hong Kong-released film that garnered critical acclaim for her performance as a store girl with a natural and innocent disposition. As with Wong Kar-past wai’s works, behind the dizzying language of the camera and the alienated people, the picture aims to convey the smallness, alienation, and loneliness of individuals in a modern city like Hong Kong, which is filled with steel jungles.

“I Love My Family” debuted in 1994 as the first sitcom produced in the new China. Hong Kong exists as usual as a distant, developed image on the opposite side of the globe in the drama. The Beijing couple, portrayed by Song Dandan and Yang Lixin, wins a seven-day vacation to Hong Kong, only to be disqualified by the corporation awarding the prize on the grounds that “the processes are too cumbersome, therefore we should return after the return of Hong Kong in 1997.” Their daughter, on the other hand, is smitten with Zhang Guo Rong, who has just played the role of Cheng Dieyi, and has numerous posters of the latter adorning her room. Owing to the allotment of the seniors’ unit, the couple and their elders and brothers continue to reside in a huge house on the plot, despite their many years of marriage and children. In that year, homes in Beijing’s outskirts cost between 710 and 1099 yuan per square meter, according to the statistics. In 1994, the housing provident fund system became official in Beijing, following a three-year trial period in Shanghai. In that year, the urbanization of the mainland was analogous to a fetus in the womb: it had acquired shape but was not yet fully developed. For a film like “Chongqing Forest,” which represents the isolation and loneliness of urban youth, it would take years for the audience to have sufficient life experience to understand and empathize with such topics.

In 1994, however, the young urban middle class was already attempting to be heard on Chinese television. Other than “I Love My Family,” there were numerous excellent efforts. Based on Wang Shuo’s novel, the eight-episode drama “Overdose” portrays the narrative of a young urban couple’s love, with love being the only and most crucial plot thread. On-screen, 27-year-old Jiang Shan exclaims, “Say you love me!” While lying on the bed, Wang Zhiwen smiles maliciously and declares, “I despise you.”

In 1994, romance itself was no longer taboo, but television shows in which love was the sole subject of expression were still viewed as significant challenges to prevailing notions. For the preceding generation, the year with the greatest influence on television screens was the airing of the “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” television series, the final vestige of the state-run system in the television business.

The tear and tension between the old and new periods are also obvious in the ageless classic “I Love My Family” that year. Jia Zhixin, portrayed by Liang Tian, is a self-employed man who has spent a considerable deal of time at cafés and dinner parties. In the first half of the program, Jia Zhixin is responsible for a great deal of the dramatic turmoil, even though Fu Ming is the show’s ostensible protagonist. The majority of the background laughing in I Love My Family came directly from the audience watching the live filming, as opposed to the later Yingda-style assembly-line comedy that relied heavily on artificial laughter. Screenwriter Liang Zuo declined the invitation, believing that only college students from Beijing’s institutions would comprehend the “laughing points” he had planted in the play. He thought the truth to be the case.

In 1994, the Chinese university had not yet been extended, and although students no longer cared much about politics and were instead absorbed in the polarities of mahjong tables and TOEFL phrases, idealism had not quite vanished. In that year, the State Education Commission and CCTV co-hosted a graduation party for college students, which was televised live throughout; both the audience and the actors were college graduates from that year. This was the first and only public celebration held in the new China, and only graduating college students participated. He Gui, who represented Beiwai on stage, directed and performed a skit, while Lao Wolf played the guitar and sang “You at the Same Table.” It was the first time this song was performed at a huge public event.

It was also graduation season for Li Keqiang. In that year, he earned a doctorate in economics from Peking University with a dissertation titled “On the Triadic Structure of China’s Economy.” In his thesis, he suggested that China cannot duplicate the old paradigm of developed countries’ agrarian societies transforming into contemporary industrial societies in a single step, but must instead undergo a time of transition. The rise of the rural industrial sector and the migration of rural residents to small towns will become crucial pivots and windows. In the same year that this study was completed, statistics revealed that the Gini index for urban Chinese was 0.37 and for rural Chinese was 0.411, both of which had deteriorated significantly from a decade or even five years earlier and would continue to rise in the mid-to late-1990s.

The chasm between urban and rural areas is expanding, and the rift between urban and rural areas is becoming more severe. At the 15th “Flying Sky Awards” held in 1994, rural reform dramas such as “People in the Ditch”, “Peasant’s Son”, “The Story of Wu Fu”, and “The Cow in Qinchuan” won various awards, and the mainstream media routinely forwarded circulars praising these dramas for reflecting the central government’s instruction of “carrying forward the main theme and insisting on diversity.” The mainstream media routinely distributed circulars applauding these dramas for adhering to the central government’s directive to “promote the core subject and insist on diversity.” With 280 million televisions in China this year, the vast majority of which are likely owned by urban inhabitants, these dramas failed to make waves in the ratings and were quickly forgotten. These names, which once filled the columns of newspapers, will not be mentioned when future generations recall the cultural climate of 1994.

“Alive”, “Journey to the West”, and “Sunny Day” were all given birth to in 1994. In this year, the bright stars illuminating the sky’s cultural dome frequently distracted us from the gray and expansive night sky behind. On the cultural front, the “battle against pornography and criminality” for the elimination of lead was in full swing, with equal fervor as the “tight crackdown” on law and order for the elimination of flesh. Nationally, 5.94 million copies of illegal books and magazines were seized in the first nine months of 1994, of which an estimated 660,000 were reportedly “obscene publications.” Parallel to the sluggish but determined urbanization process, an era’s aesthetics are undergoing a transitional stage. In contrast to the childlike and youthful 1980s, the cultural market is no longer dominated by the elite; hence, it is necessary that publications will be “diluted” in order to meet the needs of the market economy. The market has thrown the intellectuals who used to call the shots in the preceding decade into self-awareness and doubt, with some of them attempting to swim with the current and others fighting to find their own support. The current trend was a return to tradition, and in bookstores, the “Dictionary of Tang Poetry Appreciation” replaced the writings of Camus and Foucault as the intellectuals’ favorite book. Similarly, there were individuals whose disenchantment with their principles left them rootless. Zhou Wei and Li Ti arrived in Berlin in 1994, while Yu Hong traveled to Wuhan. In contrast, Beidao tried to return to China from the United States. Upon entering Chinese customs, he was detained and shortly thereafter deported back to the United States. In this year, he wrote in “The Next Tree”:

We travel throughout the world

Always beginning with the next tree

Returning so as to identify

The misery on the road.

Since then, Beidao has been teaching in California. In 2003, when his father became gravely ill, he returned secretly to see him and then departed again immediately. In that year, the departing generation of economic leaders began to assess the reform’s accomplishments and losses during the preceding decade. Ten years have passed since the adoption of the tax reform in 1994, data revealed an increase of 16.1% in yearly central revenue and 19.9% in local revenue. According to the official view, this demonstrates that the reform has benefited both the national and municipal governments.

As a rethinking and correction of the devolution of fiscal power to local governments during the 1980s, Zhu Rongji’s tax-sharing reform was in full effect in 1994, allowing for the complete expansion of central finances. This had extraordinarily far-reaching repercussions at the moment and in the future. On the one hand, it was about strengthening the stem and weakening the branches, and on the other, it was about continuing to deepen the market economy, which eventually became the pattern for the nebulous concept of the “China Model.” After the tax reform, local governments’ land finance became a new stimulant. A few years later, the urban housing system reform was fully implemented, and the age of housing allocation by units in “I Love My Family” was sent to the dustbin of history. This resulted in urban housing becoming even more of a pillar business for local governments, mirroring the urbanization process and setting the groundwork for the astronomical housing costs in first-tier cities today.

In the first half of 1994, there were over 100,000 laid-off workers in Beijing due to the institutional change that swept through state-owned businesses. A huge number of surplus laborers were banished to the society, leading the local authority to bear a substantial burden. After the tax reform of 1994, the federal government had the authority to rebate taxes to local governments, and local governments lacked the resources to oppose. As a result, the reform of state-owned businesses intensified in the mid-to late-1990s, and laid-off workers formed the “silent majority,” a gray force that dramatically influenced the decline of modern Chinese society.

The substantial shrinkage of state-owned enterprises also had domino-like effects on the next generation. The majority of SOEs are no longer able to accept fresh college graduates at set points, and in the mid-to late-1990s, a huge number of fresh college graduates entered the free job market and competed on the same level as laid-off workers. For policymakers, it was impossible to envision the repercussions of the unemployed youth entering an already saturated labor market. Thus, before the end of the century, the huge development of colleges and universities commenced, waste in society became waste in school, and college students were no longer the hallowed phrase for knowledge and civilization.

The number of students enrolled in colleges and universities is increasing, but the 1994 birth cohort is decreasing relative to the preceding generation. The national birth rate decreased from 33.43 in 1970 to 17.7 in that year, while the natural population growth rate decreased from 25.83 to 11.7. The size of urban families and the inclination of young couples to have children decreased further and have not recovered till the present day, but compulsory birth control was still in effect in rural areas that year. The emotional indifference of a generation of only children contributed to their thirst for emotional empathy and intimacy, along with economic development, urbanization, housing prices, and the expansion of education, all of which constitute the near-term concerns of anxiety and uncertainty of the youth of today and all of which planted the distant causes in 1994.

China was fully connected to the international Internet on April 20, 1994, hence 1994 is generally regarded as the first year of the Internet in China. However, not all early adopters were aware of the power that information technology will unleash in the future. After many twists and turns, Wang Xiaobo’s “The Golden Age” was finally published on the mainland that year using text-editing software he had developed himself. Zhang Chaoyang had recently returned from the United States, Ding Lei had just created his first Yahoo account, and Zhang Xiaolong had recently graduated from Wuhan and wanted to become a programmer in Guangzhou. Due to the lack of in-depth communication and expression of views in real life, the Internet has provided spiritual support to numerous young people, especially the generation born in 1994. That year, according to the standard academic system, they will receive their bachelor’s degree and then attempt to make a life among the masses. One spring afternoon, one of them read historical papers and memoirs, discovered that a similar event occurred in the year he was born, and then produced a poorly researched article. To put it plainly, his intention was merely to soothe himself by reminiscing about a time that was neither the best nor the worst, and it is difficult to find a more noble goal in that.