(Image: AP/Andy Wong)

On the surface, The Knockout is just like any other cop drama. Filled with police chases, nuanced characters, excellent acting, and thrilling suspense, it’s the hottest new release on Chinese TV and follows a group of intrepid out-of-town officials as they hunt down corrupt local bureaucrats.

It has earned an impressive 8.5 points on Douban, China’s user-based reviewing platform, and has dominated hot search feeds on Weibo and Baidu over the past few weeks. Co-producer iQiyi, a commercial online streaming platform with a reputation for creating hit TV shows, saw its stock price rise by almost 10% after release. Chinese state broadcaster CCTV says the series gleaned a cumulative total of 319 million viewers on cable TV.

Not bad for propaganda. At base, The Knockout is a tribute to Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign, co-produced by private studios and supervised by the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission (in charge of China’s justice and law enforcement systems).

It’s part of a broader campaign to popularise propaganda in Chinese film and TV. Over the past decade, the government has managed to harness the power of commercial studios and A-list talent to create increasing quality. Propaganda films have now topped the box office highest-grossing list in China each year for the past six years, and in 2022, the top three TV dramas with the highest TV ratings were all of this genre.

In part, this comes from clipping the competition — the number of foreign productions imported into the Chinese market has fallen dramatically since 2019 — but also from creating shows the public actually wants to watch.

In Chinese, these propaganda productions are dubbed “main melody.” It’s a term that means mainstream thinking, the zeitgeist — or today, what the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) wants that zeitgeist to be. Reform-minded cadres in the late 1980s wanted media to reflect main melody public views. But after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, the party reasserted itself as the one that set the tone for mainstream thinking. Main melody was its melody.

Since the early 2000s, main melody productions have been market-based shows singing mainstream tunes and glorifying the social and political lines that the CCP wants the public to value and imitate. It’s a broad list, from encouraging good behavior in public places to honouring the CCP’s past struggles, strengthening trust of current policies, or kindling patriotism and cultural confidence.

Until the late 1990s, main melody was the only melody. These films dominated cinemas, stoking patriotic fervour over China’s potential and implying that only the party could release it. But media commercialisation meant competition for eyeballs — there was suddenly more choice on TV, and all sorts of commercial films were being imported from the West, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Today, online streaming and short-video apps heighten that competition even further.

They offered viewers high-quality alternatives to old main melody formats, beginning to change tastes. “In hindsight,” writes journalist Zeng Yuli, by the early 2000s main melody productions looked ham-fisted, leaning into “grand narratives and hero tropes, with mundane plots in place of story, and slogans in place of dialogue.”

Government initiatives attempted to turn the tide. Since 2011, cinemas have had a 5% tax placed on all revenues, creating a special fund to subsidise publicity and promotion for main melody films. But a plethora of these are produced each year with an emphasis on box-ticking over quality. Zhou Xiaolan, a professor at South China Normal University, writes that some studios’ very survival has relied on government subsidy, their films tailored for government rather than audiences’ approval. There are still many truly awful main melody films released each year, playing out to nearly empty theatres.

But that’s increasingly being challenged by private enterprise. Although private studios created a handful of successful main melody productions in the 2000s, today “CCP and government agencies are learning to work very closely with commercial enterprises like iQiyi to produce and distribute state propaganda”, said David Bandurski, the director of the Hong Kong-based China Media Project. These partnerships have been responsible for many popular main melody productions over the past three years.

Private companies such as Bona Film Group, Tencent Pictures, and iQiyi are profit-driven, producing main melody shows that aim for audience engagement, tapping into what has previously drawn crowds: Hollywood-style action films, big stars, eye-catching special effects, and heart-warming patriotism. The Battle at Lake Changjin 2 (co-produced by Douyin, Alibaba Pictures, and the People’s Liberation Army’s own movie studio) had all the explosions and bombastic action sequences of a blockbuster US war film and became the highest-grossing film in China last year. And with a marketing department flush with government funding, good-quality main melody films like Lake Changjin 2 can easily score big at the box office.

The CCP is also encouraging studios to update main melody content, detoxifying a film category that many Chinese still think is dry and boring. Bandurski points out that official media periodically claim that a new state production like The Knockout has broken the mould to overcome viewer hesitance. The show is just the latest in a string of anti-corruption dramas released over the past decade — most notably 2017’s In the Name of People — each held up as innovative and exciting, praised for winning viewers with realism, suspenseful plots, and 3D characters. “It shouldn’t surprise us to see propaganda about propaganda overcoming itself as propaganda,” Bandurski said.

Some productions are banking on star attraction to draw crowds. Take Wang Yibo, a 25-year-old K-pop star with a large fanbase and 9 million followers on Weibo. In 2019, he became virtually a household name due to his role in the fantasy TV series The Untamed (with 10 billion views on Tencent Video by 2022). He has since appeared in main melody productions celebrating the CCP and China’s armed forces, including as an undercover CCP army officer, a police officer in the anti-drugs unit, and a trainee pilot in the eagerly anticipated Born to Fly, a Top Gun-esque caper from the People’s Liberation Army Air Force showing off China’s latest fighter jets.

Then there’s relatability. CCTV’s The Age of Awakening (2021), about the foundation of the CCP, wowed younger audiences by showing the love lives of party figures — a highlight being the first general secretary, the young and fiery Chen Duxiu, romantically kissing his new wife on a rainy street corner. It lent a human connection for a generation relatively uninterested in party history, earning 9.3 on Douban.

Everyday characters and scenarios keep audiences engaged and open, the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down. It’s really hard not to laugh in some scenes in the anthology film My People, My Homeland (2020) — co-produced by China Film Co., wholly owned by the National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA). There’s Zhang Beijing (played by comedy legend Ge You), a proper Beijing local who likes his drink and karaoke, who goes to farcical lengths to get his uncle treated for a serious illness. The uncle is not covered for health insurance as he is a migrant worker.

Watching it “makes you laugh all over the first second and makes you cry the next second”, says one upvoted Douban comment, adding that “the problem of rural medical insurance is too worrying”. A problem that’s coincidentally solved by the party at the end of the story, issuing Zhang’s uncle with new health insurance.

Many successful state-backed productions are now praised for being “true to life.” It’s hard not to become invested in the grinding struggles of the townspeople and party chiefs of Minning Town (2021), tasked with creating a new settlement out of the dust of 1990s Ningxia. “Guided” by the NRTA, it’s unsparing in its depiction of the area’s abject poverty. “Reality is its foundation,” reads one of the most upvoted netizen reviews on Douban. The next logical step is to think how hard the local party leaders must have worked to lift them out of such poverty.

The Knockout is more of the same. One critic wrote that he was “very glad The Knockout was not filmed in a grand and stiff manner”, full of sights of scenes of everyday life and “delicately presented” corruption, as with its villain Gao Qiqiang, the corrupt local government official who hides under a humble “man of the people” guise. In the past, the baddies were obvious in Chinese TV — clearly evil, with no redeeming qualities lest the audience be enticed to imitate them. But Gao enters the story sympathetically as a bullied fishmonger working hard for his family before he turns to a life of crime. It brings the story to the viewer’s doorstep — this could be any of your local party officials.

It’s all to win us over to the core message. The relentless determination of central party officials to weed out local corruption for the people, or else, as the anti-corruption team’s leader says, “we are not true members of the Communist Party”. Through this “the party wants to reassure the masses that China’s system is sound — and any bad guys will get caught”, notes Trivium China, a policy think tank based in Beijing.

It’s difficult to know if The Knockout is going to change any minds — people watching propaganda aren’t obliged to buy its messaging. But no doubt the show is helpful to Xi now, reminding people of his anti-corruption campaign, which is still a highly popular policy in China. It comes after Xi called for “unity” in his New Year’s address and urged war readiness for China’s military after a rough end to his zero-COVID policy, all amid provincial governments battling a debt crisis.

No doubt blaming domestic problems on local governors is convenient, when policies from the centre (such as permitting rampant local borrowing and ordering extortionate zero-COVID spending) are part of the reason China is in this rut in the first place. Maintaining people’s faith and trust in the party is more essential now than it ever was.