China’s Spring Festival Gala brings joy and tedium

China's Spring Festival Gala on the country's state broadcaster CCTV is the most watched programme on the planet. Like the Late Late's toy show or the Eurovision, it's an institution, running since 1983 and both loved and ridiculed in equal measure.

Forget the Super Bowl – at 700 million people, nearly six times as many people tuned into the Spring Festival Gala to mark the start of the year of the monkey on Sunday, and scores of millions more watched online.

They ate jiaozi dumplings and drank baijiu liquor with their families as they watched 39 different events, a blazing display of song and dance combining spectacular scenes and kitsch, emotion and sentimentality, all underpinned by a stirring nationalism that seemed a lot more pronounced this year than in previous years.

This year’s Spring Festival Gala came from Xi’an and lasted 4½ hours, featuring songs and dances, comedy sketches, legions of children doing synchronised dances and syrupy lip-synced songs, kung fu shows, songs coming out of Mongolian yurts, women singing as rockets went off behind them – what used to be called a “variety” show back in the day.

The event was broadcast live at four different sub-venues across China along with the main venue in Beijing.

There were scenes featuring soldiers performing elaborate marching routines, followed by a commentary by a comedian who spoke of how handsome the soldiers were.

By staging it in Xi’an, the show was tipping its hat to President Xi Jinping’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative, which aims to revive the ancient Silk Road route as a way of boosting flagging economic growth.

There were plenty of begrudgers, many of whom fear that Xi’s China, with its moral crusade against corruption, its Marxist ideological rigour and its nationalist tendencies, is aligning itself too much with the Mao Zedong era of 40 years ago.

Back then, there was little to tell North Korea and China apart, but since then China has opened up and its economy has become the world’s second biggest, while North Korea has languished in poverty.

However, the heavy propaganda dimension of this year’s Spring Festival Gala reminded some viewers of the North Korean rallies praising the personality cult behind the Kim dynasty that rules North Korea.

Also many feel North Korea is taunting its ideological ally by testing ballistic missiles – the latest launch was on Sunday – despite Beijing’s efforts to stop its nuclear programme.

“North Korean missile technology is getting close to China’s and the CCTV evening gala is getting close to North Korea’s,” quipped one webizen.

I challenge anyone to argue with 540 synchronised dancing robots beneath a fleet of 29 rising and falling drones, grooving to Sun Nan boasting of China’s inexorable rise against the futuristic backdrop of the city of Guangzhou.

Now that’s the way to bring in the year of the monkey.