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A crying shame

In the latest issue of the online literary journal Them, author Han Dong published a short essay entitled Moved for the Last Time, in which he grumbles about mawkish sentimentality in popular culture: 'Our newspapers are flooded with daily reports of suffering and unhappiness; sentimental true-story TV programmes do their utmost to draw out our tears. Being moved has become an everyday thing for us; it is part of our daily bread.'

It's hard not to sympathise with his irritation. There is something distasteful about mainland pop culture's grim determination to tug our heart-strings. Night after night come stories of escaped pets, terminally ill loved ones and dissolving marriages. They might be worthy of sympathy if they weren't so formulaic: tales told by 'regular folks', with heavily made-up TV hosts nodding sympathetically, the inevitable tears, the maudlin piano music ... The same phrases are recycled - 'I couldn't help being moved', 'I couldn't stop my tears', 'My tears came running down' - and the emotion seems as stale as the language.

Han laments the commodification of emotion - the little jolts of manufactured feeling that newspapers and television dole out to keep their readers hooked. Like chemical highs, he writes, they make us feel alive for a moment, but lead neither to action nor deeper realisation: they do not change us.

Han reserves his ire for newspaper and television editors, but he says nothing about the millions of audience members who willingly tune in day after day. A shot of simple emotion, no matter how manufactured, might be a welcome thing in a society so rocked by transformation that its members often don't know how to feel.

In Beijing's fancier clubs, you can often see well-dressed couples sitting across from each other in perfect silence, looking quite lost. Many Beijing cab drivers, given half a chance, will launch into cynical political tirades, but also swiftly defend their country from criticism.

Petitioners from the countryside arrive in the capital every day, furious about runaway changes at home, but still hopeful that the central government will give them justice. So few public outlets exist for the stress and ambivalence engendered by change, and so many of the passions and confusions displayed in private would be frankly illegal if made public.

So mawkishness it is, for now - though time will certainly bring increased subtlety and depth to reportage on society, and more individuals will begin to echo Han's complaint. There are even hopeful hints on prime-time TV: Li Yong , talk-show-host extraordinaire, recently interrupted a sob story from one of his guests to glance slyly at the audience and ask: 'Shouldn't we have a little piano music here?'

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