Happy Camp Redefined What "Variety" and "Entertainment" Meant in Mainland China. Twenty Years On, Those Two Ideas Have Remade the Show

This is a history of the television business handing audiences happiness. It is also a history of happiness being driven out.

In 20 short years we have run through the whole arc: entertainment was found to have value; then came the urge to amuse ourselves to death; then entertainment was questioned and denied by one powerful force after another; then, on the road paved by some people's worry about "amusing ourselves to death," entertainment became an unintended casualty. Now entertainment is an unwelcome word. The public still can't get enough of it, but it can be squeezed at will until it withers.

We can fix the starting point at 8:05 pm on July 11, 1997. It was a Friday, and a show called Happy Camp went out on Hunan Satellite TV.

At first glance it was an ordinary variety gala. It opened with dancers in bright yellow gowns walking onto the stage. Then the hosts, Li Xiang and Li Bing, greeted the audience cheerfully and announced the acrobatics act to come.

Only a third of the way in did the fun start. The hosts pulled people out of the audience for a game called Copy Me Exactly, and the crowd, until then sitting bolt upright, broke into laughter. The hidden-camera prank segment shot on location, the buzz-in quiz round, and the guest interview that followed made viewers at home let go of the channel button.

No one expected that this show called Happy Camp would keep airing for 20 years. Over those two decades it was revamped five times and cycled through more than ten hosts. By 2017, apart from the name, it bore no resemblance to what it had been. In those 20 years it redefined what "variety show" and "entertainment" meant in mainland China. And Happy Camp itself has been changed by those two ideas in turn.

I

When Happy Camp premiered, Hunan TV had been broadcasting by satellite for just seven months.

"Going up to satellite" means a terrestrial channel sends its signal up to a satellite, which relays it back down to the ground. Once a station did this it became a "satellite TV" channel, and a program that had reached only a small area could suddenly be seen across the country. Before 1992, the only satellite channels in China were CCTV's Channels 1 and 2, the Frontier Channel and the Hong Kong-Macao-Taiwan Channel. Starting with Zhejiang TV in 1994, 17 provincial stations won satellite status over the next three years, the largest number of them in 1997.

Before Hunan TV went up to satellite, its director, Wei Wenbin, had already all but finished remaking the station. Until then the provincial broadcaster's screen had been filled with ads for martial-arts schools and livestock feed, which earned it the nickname "the animal-feed station." The old station's system was rigid and its structure bloated, and the overhaul took all of Wei Wenbin's energy. By setting up Hunan Economic TV as an in-house competitor, forming reform teams and other measures, the station had by mid-1996 completed a full repackaging from "station" to "channel."

Once up on satellite, a provincial station faced CCTV and every other satellite channel in the country. To win higher ratings it needed at least one show it could put forward. Wei Wenbin told the magazine Today's Mass Media (《今传媒》) in a 2005 interview that the show should be a variety entertainment program that worked "anywhere, for anyone."

Back in 1997, Chinese television had only two truly popular entertainment programs. One was Folk Arts Variety (《曲苑杂坛》), on the air since 1991. Every Wednesday this show, dedicated to "carrying forward Chinese traditional culture and displaying the treasures of national art," ran crosstalk, comic sketches and acrobatics; it pleased both refined and popular tastes and drew a large audience. The other was Zheng Da Variety Show (《正大综艺》), co-produced by CCTV and the Charoen Pokphand Group, known in Chinese as Zhengda. As a foreign-invested company, the content provider Charoen Pokphand brought in a good deal of overseas entertainment and variety formats, and segments such as location shoots and buzz-in quizzes gradually became familiar to viewers.

But such experiments were confined to CCTV.

Chinese mass media at the time subscribed to the theory of the "three functions of media," which held that the job of mass media was surveillance of the environment, social correlation and cultural transmission. As early as 1959 the American scholar C. R. Wright had added "providing entertainment" as television's fourth function, but in China the provincial satellite channels still held to the idea that a station is founded on news.

Going up to satellite changed all that. Provincial news, valuable at home, held no appeal for a national audience, and a provincial station had no natural advantage in covering national news. Weigh it whichever way you liked, only variety entertainment could draw the largest possible audience.

What settled the matter for Wei Wenbin was a hit variety show on Hunan Economic TV. In late 1995, to scout a path for reform at the main station, Wei approved the founding of a new channel, Hunan Economic TV. In January 1996 the channel, staffed mostly by young people, launched Lucky 3721 (《幸运 3721》). It combined celebrities, games and big prizes, went out live on weekends, and drew an enormous response. The production team recalled that the hotline phones kept ringing for a full hour after each episode ended. On the back of a run of lively variety shows, Hunan Economic TV quickly made its name across the province.

The huge potential of the variety format was becoming clear. Wei Wenbin put a young producer at the main station, Wang Bingwen, in charge of planning the new show, and told the team: "Entertainment is entertainment, and you have to do it properly. Don't put on airs. As long as it's wholesome and does no harm, anything goes."

Wang Bingwen made five pilot versions before Wei Wenbin finally nodded.

As Wang Bingwen later told it: "I followed the thinking of Seven-Leaf Tree (《七叶树》), combined it with the four-team format of Zheng Da Variety Show, borrowed game segments from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan, and added the audience-hotline participation from Hunan Economic TV's Lucky 3721. That's how the show finally took shape."

Wei Wenbin's judgment was right. The first episode of Happy Camp aired on July 11, 1997. By the end of that year, the small guesthouses touting for business outside Beijing Railway Station had begun hanging out signs: This inn receives Hunan TV's Happy Camp.

II

Wei Wenbin once put Happy Camp's success down to two things: mass appeal and a willingness to innovate.

After about a year of trial and error, the show settled into a stable formula of its own: celebrities plus audience plus games. From 1997 to 2004, the three-host lineup of Li Xiang, He Jiong and Li Weijia became a national sensation. Together they tried reality-show segments, nationwide roadshows, quiz competitions and location shoots, and for seven straight years the show sat among the top three in Saturday-night ratings nationwide.

Hunan Satellite TV made a fortune out of it. A 2007 report noted that the price of the show's title sponsorship exceeded CCTV's ad rates in the same slot, and that Hunan Satellite TV's total advertising revenue grew from more than 40 million yuan in 1995 to 250 million yuan in 1998, and 600 million yuan in 2005.

Happiness became the thing Hunan Satellite TV chased. In June 2004 the channel adopted the slogan "Happy China": on an orange sphere, beside those four Chinese characters, ran the English words "BE HAPPY." It was the first television outlet in the country to give itself a clear, distinct brand identity, and in doing so it made entertainment the channel's defining position.

That same year Hunan Satellite TV launched a mass talent show, Super Girl (《超级女声》). Dramatic open auditions of ordinary people, variety-style staging and engaging audience participation made the show both a star factory and, at once, the social topic of the year. As late as 2006 it still commanded a 7.77% national viewership share, and that year's ad sales topped 130 million yuan. Praise, criticism and imitators arrived in quick succession.

As Hunan Satellite TV's oldest mass-appeal variety show, Happy Camp joined the national talent-show wave at just the right moment. Host Li Xiang had left and ratings were sagging, so the team seized the chance to run a host-hunting contest called Shining New Host. It lasted nearly a year, during which Happy Camp was effectively the channel's resident talent show, and ratings for both program and channel climbed again.

When the contest ended, Happy Camp assembled five hosts into a "host ensemble," and entered a new phase. By then Chinese variety programming had cycled through celebrity entertainment, quiz shows, guest interviews, amateur talent contests and reality dating. Audiences had tired of watching ordinary people perform their dreams, and big stars once again became the surest guarantee of ratings.

In 2008, Nine Parts Perfect (《十全九美》), a film produced by former Happy Camp host Li Xiang, opened in mainland cinemas. During the promotional run she brought the cast back onto Happy Camp, and that episode's rating approached 3%. After that, Happy Camp became a fixed stop on the promotional circuit for domestic films, and it also started helping publicize dramas that Hunan Satellite TV aired exclusively. For a while, getting onto Happy Camp was the best way for a Chinese celebrity to raise their profile. Media watchers noted that after Korean dramas swept the mainland in 2014, nearly every visiting Korean star made their first mainland appearance in Changsha, Hunan.

By August 2009, Hunan Satellite TV, built on entertainment, finally beat CCTV in the monthly ratings. For Chinese television as a whole it was the first time a provincial satellite channel had out-rated CCTV. The gap in advertising revenue between the two was no longer what it had been either. Hunan Satellite TV's ad revenue was only 600 million yuan in 2005; by 2010 it was 3.6 billion yuan, second only to CCTV-1.

The trend ran on until 2011, when the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television issued what came to be known as the "Entertainment Restriction Order." The document called for "preventing excessive entertainment and vulgar tendencies," and specified that "starting January 1, 2012, every general-interest satellite channel must broadcast at least two hours of news programming a day; between 18:00 and 23:30 there must be at least two self-produced news programs, each no shorter than 30 minutes." Variety and reality shows of all kinds were capped at nine a year and two a week, with no episode running longer than 90 minutes.

Hunan Satellite TV, built on entertainment and calling itself "Happy China," was hit hard. From April 2012 its ratings slid steadily. In some time-slot rankings the channel dropped clean out of the top ten, the first time in nearly nine years.

To hold its ratings up, Happy Camp tried to innovate on its games. By outside counts, after 2012 alone the show introduced and refined 15 live party games. In May 2017, under the influence of tabletop-game livestream shows such as Lying Man, the celebrity guests and hosts even took up Werewolf on air.

Even as the wider entertainment climate tightened, Happy Camp, which delivered actual happiness, was still in demand. Public figures show its national viewership share once reached 9.6%.

That kept it Hunan Satellite TV's most profitable program throughout. At the channel's advertising sales conference in October 2015, Happy Camp alone brought in 700 million yuan, nearly a fifth of the channel's total ad sales. It is worth noting that at the very first episode in 1997 a red banner ad reading "Little Swan Hotel Welcomes You" was already hanging behind the studio audience.

Beyond advertising, the Happy Camp team also understood star-making. As the first Chinese variety show to put forward the idea of a "host ensemble," it gave at least ten hosts national name recognition. In 2013, Bring Happiness Home (《快乐到家》), a cinema release starring several of them, came out. The film was widely panned, and still took more than 150 million yuan at the box office.

III

Few variety shows on the mainland have lasted longer than Happy Camp, though longevity is hardly a virtue in a variety show.

You can still catch Happy Camp every weekend, but it dropped out of the conversation long ago. In the first half of 2016 it still led the national ratings, peaking at 2.87, higher than the average rating of most of the year's hit dramas.

Yet it can hardly be called the hottest show anymore. In fact Happy Camp is turning into the thing it once disliked. Its format has grown ever more repetitive and it leans too heavily on the pull of whichever star turns up that week, so its ratings swing wildly. In May 2017 a single episode fell to 1.0%.

Behind the fading of Happy Camp lies Hunan Satellite TV, once built on a youthful brand, losing its core audience and sliding into decline.

1997, the year Happy Camp premiered, is also called the first year of the Chinese internet. Early that year Zhang Chaoyang founded the website Internet Technologies China, or ITC, and the following year launched the Chinese-language site Sohu; midyear Ding Lei founded NetEase; at year's end Wang Zhidong's Stone Rich Sight founded Sina.

Twenty years later, the new force those companies represented finally reached Hunan Satellite TV.

In 2015 the streaming site iQiyi launched its own variety show, U Can U Bibi (《奇葩说》). It brought in Cai Kangyong, Ma Dong and Gao Xiaosong as mentors and recruited "oddballs" to compete in debates, following a strategy of "pleasing the post-90s generation." Unlike Happy Camp, which played it straight and smoothed everything over, U Can U Bibi was combative, and its readiness to take on any subject, however coarse, quickly won audiences. Its 24 episodes that year drew more than 160 million views and spawned many imitators.

The same year Youku launched Mars Intelligence Bureau (《火星情报局》), and the year after that Tencent Video launched Roast! (《吐槽大会》). By the end of 2015, web variety shows had passed 4 billion views. Happy Camp, streaming exclusively on Mango TV, was held back by that platform's own limited reach: over the previous year its best single episode drew just 800,000 views.

Compared with Happy Camp, which was made chiefly for satellite broadcast, variety shows made for online video platforms had a built-in advantage. They faced fewer restrictions, and so had more room to invent.

In 2016, Happy Camp host He Jiong joined U Can U Bibi as a co-host. After the episode aired, one viewer wrote on a forum: "Teacher He is all harmony and no edges. Great for Happy Camp, but not for a show with corners like U Can U Bibi." A later comment pushed back: "Keep watching. Teacher He can get pretty filthy too."

The gap between Happy Camp's mass-appeal approach and the new generation of web variety shows was settled in that exchange.

The gap clearly was not about the hosts. In 2014 Hunan Satellite TV merged and relaunched its two platforms, Golden Eagle Net and Mango TV, into a single online video service, Mango TV, to fend off the internet. Among provincial satellite channels it still counted as a pioneer, but set against a real internet platform, Mango TV was already far behind.

What's more, as QDaily analyzed in an earlier article, Mango TV, still inside the state system, lagged well behind the mainstream video platforms in innovation and in how it commissioned and aired shows. And the content advantage Hunan Satellite TV once treated as its winning card has been worn away in recent years, as production and broadcasting of variety shows have separated, star teams have left, and top market-driven production companies have risen.

In 2006, when the production center was restructured, more than 30 people on the Happy Camp team decided to quit together. Wei Wenbin, away on business, gave an order to the channel's Party secretary, Liu Yiping: "Even if you drink yourself to death, find a way to keep these people for me. While you're drinking with them, pass on a word from me: every one of them has done great service for Hunan Satellite TV."

Liu Yiping got drunk, and the team stayed. But that was ten years ago, and by now Happy Camp's core creative team has turned over three times. They all went off after fresher shows people would talk about, and Happy Camp stayed where it was. It couldn't leave.

In the late 1990s and the early 2000s they captured a generation of young viewers. Time passed, and today's young audiences no longer chase Happy Camp. They chase the endless, outlandish entertainment shows online.

But the internet was not the only thing Hunan Satellite TV missed.

Over the past several years the big provincial satellite channels have been importing mature foreign variety formats and adapting them: Jiangsu TV's If You Are the One (《非诚勿扰》), Zhejiang TV's The Voice of China (《中国好声音》) and Running Man China (《奔跑吧兄弟》), Dragon TV's Top Funny Comedian (《欢乐喜剧人》). The competitive pressure on Happy Camp has mounted year by year. And Super Girl, which once helped carry Hunan Satellite TV to its peak, has never recovered its old glory, thanks to the regulator's restrictions on talent shows.

This is plainly no longer an era when the whole family gathers around one television set, and audiences with plenty of choice stopped being satisfied by monotonous indoor celebrity games long ago.

This should have been Hunan Satellite TV's strength. The early Happy Camp came out of imitating, or you might say copying, variety shows from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Producer Long Mei said: "All we can say is that Happy Camp drew on the formats of several Taiwanese variety shows of the time, but it was absolutely not plagiarism. We brought some good formats to the mainland and added local elements, and that is how a show like Happy Camp came to exist."

That attitude may in fact have held the channel back, so that it never pushed as hard as other provincial channels to license foreign formats. I Am a Singer (《我是歌手》), adapted from a Korean format, drew plenty of viewers, yet Hunan Satellite TV still preferred to tinker with the shows it had rather than bring in new ones. In recent years the accusations that Happy Camp and Day Day Up (《天天向上》) copied game segments from Japanese and Korean variety shows have never stopped.

IV

And for 20 years Happy Camp has been paying a price for happiness, even in the years when the internet had no power to take its market.

At the end of 1998, Zeng Fan'an, then director of Hunan Satellite TV, went to Beijing for a meeting. As the discussion deepened it closed in on Happy Camp, and industry peers and experts, paying no mind to Zeng sitting there, attacked the show for pushing television toward "vulgarization" and "over-entertainment." Zeng, until then quietly pleased with the show's success, began to squirm. By his account a leader from the Central Propaganda Department was also in the room; if opinion turned, the show's fate would be grim.

Happy Camp survived anyway. After the meeting the Central Propaganda Department formally settled its status. A leader walked up to Zeng Fan'an and said: "Thank you for giving the people a good program."

From then on television's entertainment function began to be accepted. Less than a year after Happy Camp premiered, Fujian TV and Beijing TV used it and Hong Kong and Taiwan variety shows as templates to launch programs of their own, such as Happy 100 (《开心100》). Stations competed with and copied one another, and provincial stations making variety shows became the norm.

But in 2006, just as talent shows were reaching a boil, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television issued its "Notice on Further Strengthening the Management of Broadcasting Organizations' Participation in, Hosting, or Broadcasting of National or Cross-Provincial Competitions and Similar Activities," which set rules for the specific segments of a talent show. Over the next three years the agency issued a series of further regulations and approvals. Talent shows grew steadily more regulated, and their influence faded.

Between 1998 and 2015, the searchable Compilation of Broadcast, Television and Film Regulations contains 33 rules governing variety and entertainment programming. It was these rules that kept the wave of mass entertainment Hunan Satellite TV had set off permanently subject to the other three social functions of mass media.

In October 2011 the agency issued its "Opinions on Further Strengthening the Management of Variety Programming on Satellite Channels," which netizens nicknamed the "Entertainment Restriction Order." It called for raising the share of news, economics, culture, science education, children's and documentary programming and lowering the share of variety shows, down to particulars: no more than two entertainment programs a week, and no more than 90 minutes of entertainment programming between 19:30 and 22:00 each day.

After the order came out, Hunan Satellite TV used every means it had to protect Happy Camp and a few other veteran shows, but limits on celebrity participation and changes to broadcast slots still sent their ratings down sharply that year. The blow to the channel is easy to imagine; afterward its whole programming mix shifted. Six months later Hunan Satellite TV had slipped to second place among provincial satellite channels.

Still, in this back-and-forth with the rules, the channel gradually found ways to adapt. In 2006 Super Girl was even officially commended for running its competition strictly to the regulator's requirements.

After the "strengthened" Entertainment Restriction Order came down in 2013, a report in Southern Metropolis Entertainment Weekly quoted Hunan Satellite TV's spokesman Li Hao: "We haven't felt that it has put us in any bind. If anything, it has sped up innovation on several fronts."

As early as 2001, Wei Wenbin had written an inscription for Hunan Economic TV: "The right orientation is worth more than gold."

On July 8 the latest 20th-anniversary special aired, rating 1.92, the highest of any channel in that slot. The celebrity guests this time were Zhao Liying and Chen Weiting. On June 22 a television commentator wrote on Weibo that people in the industry said no all-star variety show would be allowed in satellite channels' prime-time slots for the rest of the year. A blogger going by Satellite TV Commander even claimed that, apart from a few outdoor celebrity reality shows, Happy Camp would as a result face a major overhaul. So far Happy Camp has not responded.

V

Years later, in an interview, Wei Wenbin said: "I once wrote a letter to the Happy Camp team. I said the whole purpose of Happy Camp was to be light and pleasant, to let people sitting in front of the television get some enjoyment and some release. ... We've all had plenty of education growing up. As children our parents educate us; at work our bosses manage and educate us; and if we go home to a wife who isn't the right match, she manages us too. Then we sit down in front of the television, and the television is educating us as well. I said, we should teach through entertainment! ..."

That one remark says everything Happy Camp was worth. Only now such words may not come so easily from Wei Wenbin, who went on to retire as vice chairman of the Hunan Provincial Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.

Over 20 years, under regulation and constraint that only tightened, that era has ended.