A stroll through Shanghai local television

We've had a TV in the house for nearly two months now, but we don't use it very much. It mostly functions as a dim black mirror, plopped in the middle of the living room. This seemed like a bit of a waste to me. I've been curious what Shanghai local TV stations are like ever since I've moved here. The only chances I get to watch actual TV channels are at hotels. The last time I was in a hotel in Shanghai was when I was quarantined on arrival, and I was too busy then to even turn the TV on (I always found it mystifying that people seemed to think quarantine automatically leads to more free time). A friend of mine was talking about 阿庆讲故事 a few weeks ago, a low-budget Shanghainese human interest program about weirdos in the city, which made me even more curious. The only stations our TV can pick up on its own are BusMobile and MMTV, the stations that play on the little screens that the bus and metro have. (It had never occurred to me previously that these were separate broadcasts, or that one could watch them at home.) After trying a bunch of failed methods to increase our channel count for free, we gave up and bought an antenna off of Taobao for 50 yuan (less than eight US dollars). It arrived a few days, but I only unboxed it last night. I plugged in the coaxial cable and stuck the antenna next to the window (my girlfriend complained about having yet another cable running along the ground), and scanned for new channels. Now we get all the CCTV channels (China's national family of TV Channels), as well as most of the Shanghai Media Group channels. I was filled with glee, flipping from STV (the local news channel) to City Channel (都市频道, an entertainment variety channel that is the successor to the channel 阿庆讲故事 used to be on), the "Tomato Channel" (which does more national news and big budget TV shows), and SETV (an educational channel). We don't get Toonmax, so unfortunately I can't watch cartoons.

After trying out our antenna, my girlfriend got ready for bed and I spent a little time reading. But I couldn't resist the allure of exploring more of this world that was so familiar to people who'd grown up in Shanghai, but so new to me.

A little after midnight, I came back into the living room, and sat down on the sofa, the lights still turned out. I turned the TV back on and tuned into a program on City Channel called 新老娘舅, where two people with a conflict coming in each episode so that a mediator can attempt to resolve it. In this episode, the conflict was between a mother-in-law and her stepson. About twenty years ago, the son's biological mother had died, and within a few months the father got remarried with this woman 30 years younger than him, originally from Anhui. This had turned into a massive argument between the father and his two adult sons, ultimately resulting in the family becoming estranged. When the mother had died, her will had split her assets evenly between her husband and two sons, which included the house that the father now lived in with his new wife. The father had tried to sue the sons to get full possession of the apartment, but there was no real legal basis for doing so, so he retracted the lawsuit, and the sons left him be without contacting him until 2024. His wife took him, now in his 90s, back to her village in Anhui because she felt the fresh air would do him good. When the sons found out about this (I think the residents' committee of where the father and step-mother lived had contacted them, though I'm a little hazy on how they found out), they called the step-mother and she more-or-less refused to let them talk to their father (in her telling of the story, she simply told them to wait until they came back to Shanghai). A year went by and the sons decided to take repossession of the apartment, which the residents' committee allowed them to do since the mother was dead and the father couldn't be contacted. After changing the keys, they rented it out for a little over 3000 yuan a month. At the beginning of 2026, the father got sick (they never clearly stated what his sickness was) and since the village where they lived in Anhui didn't have the facilities to care for him, the step-mother decided to take him back to Shanghai, only to discover that strangers were living in their apartment. This was the conflict that they were now seeking mediation over.

Of course, my summary above elides over the most interesting part of the show, which is that the mediator had to force this story out of the two parties bit by bit. The step-mother speaking in slow and steady Mandarin, seemed calm and collected on the surface, but often left out key details. The son spoke in fast Shanghainese, shouting angry abuses. He'd make disgruntled expressions whenever the step-mother said something he didn't like, and had a bad habit of not directly respond to questions the mediator posed him, even when it would turn out that he had completely reasonable answers. E.g. when she asked him if he contacted the residents' committee he went on a tirade about how useless residents' committees are. It took five minutes of back and forth until they finally prodded out of him that he did in fact go through all the proper channels.

This is the exact sort of thing someone like me needs: a lot of mysteries about Chinese housing law suddenly made sense. "So that's what the residents' committee does!" Or "that's why people make such a big deal about property owner certificates!" In my normal everyday life as a foreigner, I get the opportunity to observe many things, but very little is ever explained to me. If I just go along with the various systems that are set up or nod along to people's conversations, they assume I have all sorts of common knowledge that, in reality, I lack. Where does common knowledge come from? TV, apparently.

Unfortunately, in this case, there was too much to the story to fit into one episode, so I didn't get to the see the resolution. Instead the show cut to an extended ad for Grandma Zhang's sea cucumbers, which are now sold within 48 hours after being harvested. The ads made a big deal about how improvements in transportation infrastructure make it possible for them to have the freshest sea cucumbers on the market. Most of the programs I saw on City Channel last night and this morning had a segment where the host said a word or two about the sea cucumbers.

It seemed a little spooky to me that the entire channel was so dominated by a single sponsor.

I turned the TV off, brushed my teeth, and slipped into bed next to my girlfriend, who was lying unconscious with her phone still in her hand, playing the same Douyin video on repeat. As gently as I could, I pulled it away from her and turned off the screen. Then I too closed my eyes and contemplated all I'd seen on the TV until I fell asleep.

I woke up around 8:30 the next morning and gradually pulled myself out of bed. I made a cup of coffee, had a banana, and decided to turn the TV back on to see what wonders would greet me this time. I tuned into the tail end of an interview with a dance teacher, roughly my parents' age, demonstrating the difference between 海派 (Shanghainese) and 江南 (Jiangnan, i.e. the provinces around Shanghai) dance styles. The hostess of the program had the same haircut as a Taiwanese actress I met a few months ago when my friend Little Man (pronounced like the "mon" in "Pokemon", not "man" as in "human") needed an extra to play a mute French guy in a movie he was boom operator for. The actress in the movie played a "cosmopolitan aunt" trying to encourage the main character to start painting again. She had short bangs resting level with her eyebrows and little wisps instead of sideburns on either side of her face whose tips went backwards, kissing her earlobes, with the rest of her hair pulled back in a pony tail. The TV program hostess, somewhere between my age and my mom's age, which very well might be the perfect age for a cosmopolitan aunt to be, got me thinking about the significance of this haircut. It felt very old to me -- the sort of haircut a fashionable woman in the mid-2000s might have, maintained without change into the year 2026. The whole program felt like that to me -- it was strange to think this had all just been recorded. The hostess was supposed to act as someone youthful, in contrast to the old lady they were interviewing, but instead she was more like what my dad might imagine when someone says "young woman from Shanghai," rather than what one finds out in nature, wandering the streets.

The next program was an in-depth look at a marriage matchmaking service. I'd seen an ad the night before for what I presume was the same service. I found the ad strange, because it showed the female staff of the agency (mostly in their 50s) and female clients talking to the staff, but no happy couples or success stories, just closeups of the forms they filled out and the staff talking about how patient and dedicated they were. The segment I watched this morning was similar, in that it was very female focused, to the point that it felt like we'd entered a world where men were an exotic species. We met a client and watched as the matchmaker asked her about herself (she was a pharmacist who enjoyed Jubensha and was looking for someone tall with similar hobbies who had to be a Shanghaier). For the initial meeting with the matchmaker, she wore no makeup and dressed like the kinds of women I'd see at the Tongji University library who had enough provisions stacked around them that they wouldn't need to go outside for a week -- but when it came time to meet a prospective match, she came back with the kind of eye-shadow and t-shirt you'd see on a young somewhat-rebellious daughter in a Taiwanese drama from five or six years ago wear. The match himself was hidden by mosaic, his voice transformed into a chipmunk sort sound. When she said she likes guys who take initiative in starting a relationship, he replied that he's not that sort of person. Instead of turning the woman off, this sparked even more interest towards him. After the interview was over and she debriefed with the matchmaker, she commented on how honest and dependable he seemed, and the voiceover philosophized about how different what we think we like is from what we actually like. The program went on beyond this, but this particular woman's story trailed off here, so I lost interest. I could feel the possibility that this television watching I was doing might turn into a habit, so I quickly took advantage of the sudden apathy I felt to turn the TV off, rather than flip to another channel.

I tried entering TV world again in the evening while I was having dinner. This time, I wanted to give STV （上视新闻综合频道）, the local news channel, a try. They played a ten minute segment about a project funded by Alibaba to mobilize Shanghai's citizens to record themselves reading prompts in Shanghainese to use for training an AI voice model. The news anchor, using Shanghainese, interviewed a researcher leading the project, who spoke in Mandarin. An old lady who helped verify recordings were standard and correct was also there. She naturally spoke in Shanghainese. They framed the project as "protecting Shanghainese," which felt like a pretty bleak way to think about it. "The language may die out, but at least the computer can keep speaking it for us."

I don't think I expected so much of the programming to be so transparently about Shanghainese identity. I imagined just "normal local television" where people happened to be speaking in Shanghainese. Of course, I'm not really sure what local TV is supposed to be like. I never watched any of the local channels in Baltimore much. Did they have all sorts of human interest stories that tried to fold in some message about the uniqueness of Baltimore and our rich history? Obviously they couldn't betray any hostility towards "outsiders" moving into our city, diluting its culture, and raising its land prices (though maybe that's something one sees more in West Coast local TV).

I'm worried that I'll get sick of all this local pride if it's served to me at such a high dosage by such "normal seeming" people. I'm much more interested in local pride when it's weirdos engaging in it, like Zhou Haiming, who runs a cheaply printed magazine of avant-garde poetry by Shanghaiers. Otherwise, why should I care?

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