Reflections on Aspirations Fever

Abstract

At the time of the exchange between the old Year of the Horse and the new spring of the Year of the Ram, the fifty-episode, large-scale indoor television production, Aspirations, has indeed managed to cause an explosive social impact. From Nanjing to Beijing, from Chengdu to Wuhan, its broadcasting set a new record of viewing rates throughout China, unprecedented in the history of Chinese television. The emotions of millions of people, old and young, men and women, rose and fell with the development and fate of the characters in the drama. Joy, misery, anger, and grief has been stirred up in a rarely seen "fever" that affected an unprecedented number of people of all walks of life. Today, this feverish wave of enthusiasm has receded, yet I believe that its value, as a noteworthy sociocultural phenomenon in itself, is far greater than the television production itself. For this reason, I thought of employing the ideas of Marxist historical materialism and dialectical materialism to conduct a sober and scientific analysis of the Aspirations fever and, having gained some insight from the exercise, I believe it is worthwhile to set down these thoughts in the form of a set of "postmortem reflections."