CCTV Spring Festival Gala

The Engine of an Empire, Live at 8 PM

A particular kind of vertigo kicks in when you try to grasp the scale of the CCTV Spring Festival Gala. Super Bowl numbers don’t even belong in the same conversation. This is a live television event that pulls in more than a billion viewers at once, a 4.5-hour relay of songs, dances, cross-talk, and state-approved uplift that has aired every Lunar New Year’s Eve since 1983. Across 44 seasons, *Chunwan* (as people casually call it) hasn’t merely mirrored Chinese culture; it has helped manufacture the national mood. Treating it like just another variety show misses the point so badly it feels almost silly. You may as well file notes on the weather.

It didn’t begin as this sleek machine. The first 1983 edition was almost homespun: a 600-square-meter studio, four live telephones, viewers calling in song requests. Now, in 2026, it arrives in 8K, over 5G, with a vertical feed built for phones, plus AI robot dancers gliding in unnervingly perfect sync beside human performers. The technical reach is enormous. But underneath the augmented-reality dragons and all those gliding crane shots, the job of the Gala is still the same. It works as a national hearth in visual form, carefully staging unity, prosperity, and "family culture" for a vast population and diaspora.



Watch one of the big musical set pieces from the recent years and the visual grammar becomes obvious fast. Red and gold are everywhere, pushed to full intensity. The stage barely contains the performers; it absorbs them, turning hundreds of eerily synchronized dancers into shifting patterns across an LED floor. The excess has a physical weight to it. This is more than performance. It’s stability rendered as spectacle, so forceful that you either give in to it or let it blur into the background while you eat dumplings.

Still, the Gala gets most interesting when its polish slips. The hosts are what keep this massive live organism stitched together, all fixed smiles and disciplined posture. Sa Beining is especially compelling in that setup. He started out in serious legal and investigative television, and his shift over the last decade into the genial, booming face of the country’s biggest annual celebration is a remarkable piece of code-switching. He gives the whole thing ballast.



But his co-host, Neghmet Rakhman, accidentally gave the show one of its most revealing recent moments. During the 2025 broadcast, heavily sponsored by Huawei, he was photographed backstage taking a selfie with an iPhone. The image spread quickly before it was scrubbed, and netizens had a field day with it. Tiny detail, sure. Almost nothing. But I keep coming back to it. In a tightly managed, intensely nationalistic setting where every prop and every pixel is scrutinized, a host casually pulling out the "wrong" phone felt bizarrely electric. For a second, you could see the ordinary human being inside the apparatus.

Complaining about the Gala, of course, is practically part of the tradition. Chinese social media has long circulated the line that with *Chunwan*, "there'll never be a 'worst', just 'worse than last year'." And as the show has leaned further into explicit ideological messaging, often pushing aside regional opera in favor of sweeping invocations of the "Chinese Dream" and core socialist values, younger viewers have grown openly cynical. The television stays on. But their real attention is on their phones, shaking them for virtual red envelopes in WeChat promos.



I’m not sure the CCTV Spring Festival Gala still works as entertainment, or whether that is even the point anymore. It feels closer to a civic timepiece. Once the host starts the final countdown and "Can't Forget Tonight" rolls in, it stops mattering whether the sketches hit or the pop songs felt stale. The ritual has done its job. The year turns. The Gala doesn’t really ask to be loved or applauded; it asks that you show up, and year after year, people do.