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SCMP Reporter

Mainland TV dramas are increasingly casting expatriates in roles that show them not as villains or freaks but as everyday people who share local ideas and practices.

Entertainment industry sources say they do not know exactly how many foreign actors have appeared on Chinese TV, but agree the number has surged and they expect it to get bigger.

China Central TV (CCTV), which broadcasts to all provinces, recently started using foreign actors and actresses in the TV drama Modern Household  and another that stars a foreign child - the son of an Italian Embassy staff member.

Earlier this year, Beijing TV showed a drama series, Zhongguancun Story,  named after the capital's hi-tech district. Foreigners in the story were supposed to be Americans, although they spoke English with Eastern European accents.

Foreigners have also appeared in singing contests and on TV quiz shows, both as judges and contestants.

'Before, the audiences didn't understand [foreigners]. There was a feeling of distance,' Yu Man, of the CCTV drama department, said. 'Now, by way of TV dramas, they can see common points, such as relations in a family.'

In the 1970s, dramas and films portrayed foreigners as villains, said Mei Feng, a lecturer with the Beijing Film Academy.

He said that until the 1990s, Chinese ethnic minorities - such as Uygurs from Xinjiang - would play the parts of foreigners because few foreigners lived in China.

Russians, some of Beijing's earliest expatriates, would also act the parts of other white-skinned foreigners, and continue to do so.

In the 1990s, diplomatic families and language students became more common in Beijing, and over the past five years the expatriate community has grown to more than 100,000.

Mr Wei said film production companies were based in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, and these cities were the easiest places to find foreign actors.

'Viewers want a sense of a real foreigner,' Mr Mei said. 'They are not being used for commercial reasons or for the moral of a story.'

Ms Yu said because foreigners lived in China and people were curious about their native cultures as well as relations with Chinese people, audiences wanted to see them on TV.

Mr Wei said audiences also wanted to see realistic portrayals and they knew what was real from watching overseas movies.

Zhou Qingan, a research assistant with the Tsinghua University Centre for International Communications Studies, said some also wanted to see foreign acting styles and many hoped Chinese and foreign actors could learn from each other.

'If there is this trend, it's a good one,' said Mr Zhou.

Larry Tung, a Taiwan native studying film in the United States, said the use of foreigners might also indicate that Chinese people saw foreignness as fashionable.

'People try to be Westernised because it represents a different, if not higher, social status,' he said.

In Taiwan, where foreigners were more visible than on the mainland, relatively few TV dramas showed overseas actors, he said.



Foreign actors finally cast as real people instead of freaks