Yang’s ultimate mission is not to trash American TV but to make good TV in China. In May she receives her graduate degree in international communications from Columbia University in New York, with a final paper briskly summing up the impact of American TV talk on its audiences. With guests “so weird, so bizarre,” says Yang, “they can’t have a positive effect.” She describes the American shows as a kind of multiple-guest collision between dented couples and their steamy stories piling up onstage. The 27-year-old star’s next move is to go back to China and help guide its fledgling TV industry into something a good deal less strange than the American version. “You know,” she says in crisply formal English, “a country with such a vast territory and such a rich and long culture deserves to have its own culture, instead of a borrowed one.”
Yang’s runaway success with the “Zheng Da Variety” show helped displace foreign imports at the top of China’s TV ratings. Until the early ’90s, American dramas like “The Man From Atlantis” and Hong Kong song-and-dance spectacles had routinely outdrawn Chinese shows by as much as 3 to 1. “Now they are even,” says Yang proudly. She worries that Chinese producers now spend much of their time making what they grandly call “soirees”–knockoffs of the Hong Kong spectacles. But with growing prosperity, Chinese viewers increasingly find their own culture as alluring as Hong Kong or “Dynasty.” “People are rethinking all their values, everything their parents have told them,” says Yang. On talk shows, “you don’t get unified answers, which is very exciting for television.”
Yang’s liveliest shows addressed tensions (no, not dysfunction) in families of the growing middle class. One big one was on wives who make more than their husbands. Another: who does the housework? Anything more private, Yang leaves to the midnight radio shows. Besides, she says, her audience of 200 million includes members of the Beijing elite as well as the vast peasant class who don’t want to hear about explicit sex. “In my personal view, certain censorship is important, since nations have different social and cultural backgrounds,” says Yang, who has often worked for Chinese state television. “I certainly have enough room to move around in my programs.”
It may seem hard to place a woman who accepts censors and disdains the “ratings race” in the constellation of television talk-show stars. She ain’t no Oprah. Yang is the daughter of two Beijing professors with what an acquaintance calls “no material aspirations.” Last week she turned her back on the American spotlight after a New York Times reporter discovered that she was toiling away anonymously at Columbia. Lawyers and agents are beating on her closed door. Interview requests poured in–the “Today” show, David Letterman. Yang turned down all but one. At school, where she’s an A student, her peers “were unaware that she’s a star back home. She doesn’t talk about it. And she wears jeans to class, no makeup,” says her faculty adviser, Donald Johnston. “One of my assistants just walked in and asked what she looks like.”
When Yang goes back home she plans to leave the talk-show racket behind. She has a new documentary show–“Yang Lan Horizon”– ready to go. Produced by her husband, Bruno Wu, and financially backed by Wu’s old friend Maroley Communications chief Robert Morgado, “Horizon” will look at ties between American and Chinese culture. Can Broadway musicals make it in China? Yang sees broad similarities to Peking opera, but notes the enormous hurdles: Broadway-style lighting, design and other arts don’t exist in China. Another show examines parallels between Steven Spielberg’s movie on the Holocaust (“Schindler’s List”) and Chinese director Xie Jin’s upcoming film on the Opium Wars.
As with everything Yang does, there is a serious point: to improve Chinese TV and “promote the bond between the two countries, instead of breaking them up.” Timely idea–but a bit too serious? For popular American tastes, perhaps. In China, the show is already syndicated to channels that reach 80 percent of the nation’s 200 million television households. With that kind of reach, Yang Lan is likely to draw more viewers than Oprah, Phil and all the rest combined.
