Spring Festival Gala

The Spring Festival Gala (Chunwan, 春晚) is a live television variety show produced for the Lunar New Year's Eve. Its first live nationwide edition aired in 1983 on China Central Television's predecessor structure and has been held every year since. It combines music, dance, comedy skits, crosstalk, acrobatics, opera and martial arts with official messaging. Its producer is now China Media Group (CMG), which took over the programme after CCTV was folded into the group. Because the broadcast is scheduled around the Spring Festival reunion dinner, it has become part of the holiday itself, not just a programme watched during it.

The gala matters for three reasons. It is one of the largest regularly recurring audiences in media history, and different measures of that audience produce very different headline figures. It shows how a state broadcaster has dealt with changing ideas of entertainment, national identity and family life across four decades of reform. And it is a case study in how a single broadcast has shifted from a fixed television schedule to a multi-platform, multilingual and increasingly interactive event, with AI and live-streaming now part of its production.

The article follows a rough chronology and then a set of thematic questions. It starts with the origins of the programme and the 1983 switch to live broadcast, and then describes its format, organisation and signature genres. It then turns to audience measurement, the gala's place in New Year customs, its technical evolution and its overseas reach. The final sections cover the main criticisms and debates, and the scholarly approaches used to study the programme.

Origins and the 1983 Live Broadcast

The Spring Festival Gala grew out of a short and uneven history of New Year programmes on Chinese television. Beijing Television, the predecessor of China Central Television, started trial transmissions on 1 May 1958 and began regular broadcasting that September. Sources disagree about the first holiday-evening programmes. One dates small New Year's Eve broadcasts to 1956, while another treats a 1956 documentary film called Spring Festival Grand Gala, made by the Central Newsreel and Documentary Film Studio, as the earliest prototype. The station's New Year programming was interrupted during the Cultural Revolution, a period when live broadcasting was regarded as politically sensitive.

After 1978, when the station was renamed China Central Television, the New Year programme returned in recorded form. Accounts differ on the exact start. Some place the first revival in 1978, while others point to a 1979 "tea party-style" gala titled Welcome the New Year Literary and Art Gala, directed by Deng Zaijun, which was recorded and then broadcast. Television was still scarce at the time; one source notes that only about 4.85 million sets existed nationwide in 1979, so the programme had limited social reach. A further pre-recorded gala was aired in 1982. These editions established the idea of a national New Year evening show, but they were not yet live.

The decisive change came in 1983. In November 1982, Huang Yihe, who was responsible for singing and dancing programmes at CCTV, received instructions to organise a gala for the Lunar New Year. During planning meetings, a colleague suggested inviting viewers to phone in requests for their favourite songs. The team extended this idea into a wider plan for audience participation and, ultimately, a complete live transmission. Four telephone lines reportedly took requests from across the country during the broadcast, and three pre-recorded segments were added to respond to viewer requests. The first edition aired on 12 February 1983, at 20:00, from a studio of about 600 square metres with roughly 60 staff and 200 guests. Huang later described the aim modestly, as a simple party covered by only five cameras. The official theme was "Unity, Joy, Hope."

The political setting mattered. The show appeared in the early years of Reform and Opening-up, when television sets were spreading and audiences were hungry for entertainment after a decade of restricted cultural life. Scholars who analyse the 1983 edition often read it as a sign that the earlier revolutionary repertoire was giving way to themes of family, consumption and national development, although the interpretation of this shift is debated. Not every item was uncontroversial. Pop singer Li Guyi performed the song Hometown Love on national television, a song that had been officially banned amid the "spiritual pollution" campaign; the performance was permitted with the approval of the minister in charge of radio and television, who was in the audience. Huang reportedly also staged other songs that were restricted at the time.

The first editions set a template that later galas followed. They combined songs and dances with crosstalk, poetry recitals, regional and Peking opera, magic, acrobatics and martial arts. They placed a mix of established and new performers before a studio audience, used non-professional hosts (Ma Ji, Jiang Kun, Wang Jingyu and Liu Xiaoqing are usually named for 1983), and treated the programme as a single continuous evening rather than a series of separate shows. Huang directed the gala in several early years, including 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986 and 1990. The principle that the show should be live, long and varied, and should invite viewers to take part, shaped the form that the gala kept for the decades that followed.

Format and Programme Structure

Running order and content

The gala is a long, multi-genre variety programme. Its content is broadly consistent from year to year, with around 30 acts: acrobatics, singing, dance, comic sketches (xiaopin 小品), crosstalk (xiangsheng 相声), magic, Peking Opera, public service segments, and tributes to national heroes. A 2023 live blog put the count at some 30-40 different acts. The sequence itself is kept secret until the last moment. The final version of the programme is only released quite last-minute, even though the full show has already gone through multiple rehearsals. The show closes with the midnight countdown, when the hosts and everyone watching say "Happy New Year" together at midnight.

Duration and broadcast timing

Reported running times differ between sources. An encyclopedia entry gives approximately 270 minutes, while a 2023 live blog described a show from 8pm to 1am Beijing time, and a travel guide placed the end around 00:30. The start time is fixed. The 2025 edition aired at 8 p.m. Beijing Time across multiple CMG television channels, and it is also carried on radio and online platforms. I did not find an official explanation for the 8 pm slot. The evening placement is tied to the eve of the Lunar New Year and to the midnight countdown, and the sources do not say more about the reasoning.

Traditional arts and popular entertainment

The programme keeps traditional performance forms in its core lineup. Recent previews listed songs, dances, skits, cross-talk, operas, martial arts, magic, and more, and folk arts appear alongside them. Regional material is also a structural element. The show includes segments that spotlight China's provinces and various ethnic groups, and it features spots about national heroes and key government projects — such as the Belt and Road Initiative. Popular acts sit beside these forms. Producers have sometimes added pop acts to a lineup that traditionally leaned on opera, as with the boy-band act noted in press coverage of the 2017 edition.

Staging and multimedia

Staging has moved steadily toward multimedia. One earlier edition was broadcast in 4K ultra high-definition over a 5G network for the first time, and real-time VR transmissions were broadcast through a 5G network live from the sub-venues of Shenzhen. The 2026 edition was described by its broadcaster as blending cultural depth, technological innovation and international flair.

Annual theme and motto

Each year CMG announces a motto that frames the show. The 2026 motto, "Galloping Steed, Onward Unstoppable", comes from an ancient Chinese poetry and captures the spirit of moving forward with unwavering confidence and optimism for what lies ahead. Official framing linked it to the national agenda, since the theme reflects the nation's ambitious goals as it enters the 15th Five-Year Plan period. The motto carries into visual design, and the logo incorporates classic elements of traditional Chinese cloud, thunder, and meander patterns to depict four horses galloping side by side. Mascots were also drawn from the same idea. Post-broadcast coverage, however, described the 2026 show as centered on the theme of "Joy and Auspiciousness, Festive and Cheerful", which suggests that the announced motto and the editorial framing used in reporting are not always identical. Public sources do not document in detail how a motto determines the choice of individual acts.

Organisation, Production and Official Role

Institutional framework

The gala is made by China Media Group (CMG), a structure created in March 2018 by bringing together state broadcasting holdings, including CCTV, China National Radio, China Radio International and China Global Television Network (It was founded on 21 March 2018, as a fusion of the state-holding media enterprises of China Central Television, China National Radio, China Radio International and China Global Television Network.). The old CCTV organisation was dissolved as a separate body, yet its name survived internally as a call sign (it retained the original call sign CCTV internally.). In the programme's credits, the change is visible: the 2025 edition was described as produced and broadcast by China Media Group (CMG).

Administrative and political oversight sits above the broadcaster. CCTV is supervised by National Radio and Television Administration, and led by the Publicity Department of the Chinese Communist Party. That chain of authority explains why the gala's production is treated as a matter for the propaganda system as well as for television.

Planning, direction and rehearsal

Each edition has a director team, and recent editions have been led by pairs. For 2026, Beijing's main stage was placed under Yu Lei while Zhang Yiyi coordinated the branch venues. Programme selection is wide-ranging: for the 2025 edition, producers looked for creative inspiration from all over the country and drew on outside creative input.

Rehearsal is the main quality-control stage. The CCTV 2025 Spring Festival Gala successfully completed its fifth rehearsal on 26 January, and the 2026 team likewise orchestrated five full-scale rehearsals. Material is also cut at this point. The director team has explained that a short skit in 2025 reflected repeated testing during rehearsals, when they continuously tested comedic bits and adjusted the pacing, removing bits that didn't land well.

Supervision by officials is a long-standing feature. For the early editions, the Publicity Department of the Chinese Communist Party and the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television were on scene during the gala's rehearsal to supervise its production. Senior propaganda officials have also paid visits to the Chunwan production team over the years. Accounts of specific content decisions are fragmentary; one widely cited case is a segment on migrant workers, which was reportedly added on the recommendation of Premier Wen Jiabao. In an earlier edition, CCTV's head publicly pledged that the show would exclude "low style" material and performers with moral misdeeds.

Official functions

Official language frames the gala as a national ritual of reunion rather than just entertainment. CMG's leadership has described it as a "spiritual New Year's Eve dinner" for Chinese people and friends at home and abroad. Scholarly descriptions similarly note that the programme pairs performance with official messaging, so that national messages and the year's political themes are conveyed through the show's content and its annual slogan. Whether these functions are best read as deliberate policy or as shared cultural expectation is a matter of interpretation.

Main venue and sub-venues

Regional stages were first used in 1988, and the Gala also began experimenting with establishing sub-venues, enabling simultaneous live broadcasts from the main venue and sub-venues. In 2016 the format was expanded to four sub-venues in the east, west, south, and north of China, which broadcast live simultaneously with the main venue in Beijing. No sub-venues were used for 2021 to 2023 (No sub-venues were established for the Spring Festival Galas in 2021, 2022, and 2023.), and the 2024 edition returned with a "1+4" model, consisting of a main venue and four sub-venues.

The division of labour is that each regional team will dig deep into the unique historical and humanistic highlights and regional characteristics of each venue, while Beijing holds the programme together. The 2026 edition used Harbin, Yiwu, Hefei and Yibin (Harbin City in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, Yiwu City in east China's Zhejiang Province, Hefei City in east China's Anhui Province, and Yibin City in southwest China's Sichuan Province.).

Public detail on sponsorship and commercial partnership is sparse in the sources available. The clearest documented commercial effect is on local tourism: sub-venue cities report that such sub-venues have become an important window to showcase the images, cultural features and local customs of various cities, boosting tourism in those places. Figures from local promotional material should be treated with caution; a Yiwu release, for example, reported over 600,000 tourist visits linked to its gala-themed activities.

Signature Genres and Notable Performances

Comedy skits (xiaopin)

Short sketch comedy, called xiaopin in Chinese, became the most visible comic form on the programme. Its rise was driven largely by performers from northeastern China, and as television spread, live-audience forms such as crosstalk gave way to sketch shows that drew partly on Western models. Early comedy was a deliberate innovation that helped the gala stand out from earlier national television, but the form also faced caution. Hosting decisions in the early years were controversial because officials and programmers were wary that comedians might be too vulgar for a public still recovering from the Cultural Revolution.

The actor most closely identified with the form is Zhao Benshan, whose first national appearance came in 1990, after an earlier attempt to reach Beijing in 1987. He became a fixture for roughly two decades, playing rural and northeastern characters in local dialect, wearing a dark blue Zhongshan suit, and leaving catchphrases that spread into everyday speech. He was absent in 2015, after more than two decades of appearances, and one analysis links his popularity to his use of folk humour that both follows and mocks official discourse. Other key figures include Song Dandan, who often worked alongside Zhao; Chen Peisi and Zhu Shimao, who began working as a comic pair for the gala in 1984; Gong Hanlin, whose henpecked husband in the 1990 sketch Playing Mahjong became one of the most iconic comic roles; and Zhao Lirong, a Pingju actress who began comedy work on the gala in the 1980s. Later mainstays include Cai Ming, who still opens the comedy segment in recent editions, Shen Teng and Ma Li, and Xiao Shenyang, whose Money Is Not an Issue (2009) was widely remembered. A 2026 study of masculinity in the skits notes that comic male roles moved over time from urban characters speaking standard Mandarin toward more marginal figures speaking with regional accents, many played by folk performers.

Crosstalk (xiangsheng)

Crosstalk is a two-person spoken comedy tradition, and it was present from the first edition. The 1983 hosts included crosstalk artists Jiang Kun and Ma Ji, and Jiang Kun performed three crosstalk pieces that night. Crosstalk was traditionally built for a live audience, and the transition to television required shorter routines, tighter timing and less reliance on the audience's immediate reaction. By the 2020s, commentators were describing the form as sidelined by sketch comedy on the programme. The gala has nonetheless continued to feature crosstalk duos, and in 2011 a crosstalk routine by Zhao Benshan and Xiao Shenyang was among the acts recognised in the programme's own viewer-voted awards.

Songs, dance and regional music

Song has always been the largest category. In 1983, the singer Li Guyi performed nine songs, a record for a single performer that the sources describe as lasting for a long time. Other songs from that year, such as Zheng Xulan's The Sea, My Hometown, are still widely sung. In the 1980s, Taiwanese-American singer Kris Phillips (Fei Xiang) performed on the gala, and her song A Fire in Winter became a hit. Folk and ethnic music has been present throughout. Ulan Tuya, an Inner Mongolian singer whose songs use the morin khuur, a traditional instrument, performed on the programme in later years, and regional folk dance such as the yangko, from north China, has been a recurring choice for large group numbers.

Widely discussed performances

The 1983 performance of Li Guyi's Hometown Love (乡恋) is among the most cited moments. The song had earlier been banned for what officials considered excessively personal sentiment, and when the live hotlines were flooded with requests for it, the production team initially resisted them before Li sang it on air. Accounts differ on the title and on the sequence of events, and some sources say the team had planned a different song. In 2025, sixteen humanoid robots joined human dancers in a synchronised yangko routine, which was directed by Zhang Yimou and became one of the most talked-about numbers of that year's edition; it is discussed further under robotics and in the section on technical evolution. [Editor's note: details of the 2026 cross-cultural performance in Yiwu could not be verified from the sources consulted and are omitted here pending confirmation.]

Audience Measurement and Viewing Figures

The Guinness record and the "most-watched" claim

The gala's best-documented external recognition is a 2012 entry in Guinness World Records. The entry measured a unique reach of 498,659,000 viewers across CCTV-1, 3 and 4, the three channels that carried the show at the same time in 2012. The counting rules were specific: CSM Media Research supplied the figures and counted viewers aged four and above who watched at least one minute of the show on any of the three channels, and the figure excludes duplication across channels. Guinness described this as almost 40 per cent of the Chinese TV population aged four and over (the figure is almost 40% of that population).

The record is narrower than the broader claim that the gala is the world's most-watched television programme. Guinness's category concerns national network broadcasts in a single year, and it does not by itself rank the gala against every programme worldwide. The wider claim circulates in reference works and media coverage, and the broadcaster itself has asserted larger figures: the broadcaster claimed one billion viewers in 2018. Bloomberg, reporting on the programme, noted that the number of viewers has been variously touted at about 700 million, which shows how loosely audience totals have been reported in different contexts.

Why headline figures diverge

Most of the discrepancies come from the metric chosen rather than from contradictory observations. At least five kinds of measure are in use:

• Reach: the number of distinct people who watched for a minimum period, as in the 2012 Guinness entry.
• Concurrent audience: the number watching at any one moment. For 2026, the broadcast maintained an average of 325 million concurrent viewers and listeners per minute, with peak viewership surging past 400 million.
• Cumulative audience at a cut-off time: the number of people reached by a given moment, typically midnight. For 2026 this is the 677 million figure, which reports describe as preliminary statistics.
• Views: individual plays or instances, which can be counted many times per person.
• All-media or on-demand totals: combined counts across television, streaming, short-video and social platforms, often with on-demand plays added.

Because these measures use different units and cut-off times, a headline such as "hundreds of millions" or "billions" can refer to very different things.

2024 and 2026 compared

The 2024 and 2026 reports illustrate the problem. For 2024, as of midnight on February 9, the gala had drawn 679 million viewers, with total views reaching 1.501 billion. A different 2024 release, using a later cut-off, reported that as of 8 a.m. on February 10, the gala had drawn 795 million viewers through new media platforms. The 2026 headline of 677 million by midnight is therefore lower than one 2024 figure, even though the 2026 reports describe the year as a record. The comparison is only meaningful when the unit and window are the same.

The 2026 reports emphasise different measures. They state that domestic all-media viewership reached 23.063 billion, marking a 37.3 percent increase from 2025, and that the live broadcast captured 79.29 percent of the national TV audience share, the highest level in 13 years. In 2024 the comparable TV share was 75.61 percent of the live TV viewing market. The 2024 "omnimedia" measure instead counted a total of 14.2 billion people by 2 a.m. on February 10, which is a count of people rather than views, so it cannot be set directly against the 2026 all-media views. A 2025 report, which used yet another combination of live and on-demand streams, gave viewership for both live streaming and on-demand streaming reaching 2.817 billion. The 2026 direct on-demand and live total of 16.207 billion is far above that figure, which suggests that the definition of the counted quantity changed between years, although the sources do not fully explain the change.

Independent verification and the limits of the data

Almost all recent figures come from China Media Group and from state-linked outlets such as China Daily, CGTN and Xinhua, and most are released as preliminary totals shortly after the broadcast. The publications I consulted do not publish sampling designs, panel sizes or the rules used to merge television and digital counts across platforms, so outside researchers cannot reproduce the headline numbers. The 2012 Guinness entry is the main independent check, and it depended on a commercial measurement firm's television data rather than on the broadcaster's internal platform statistics, which are the source of most later claims.

Academic commentary has also offered estimates rather than measurements. One analysis describes the viewership as approaching at least a third of China's total population of 1.4 billion, a rough scale comparison and not a counted figure. Readers should therefore treat broadcaster totals as directional indicators of scale. Research on the gala's audience would need to separate the concurrent, reach, view and on-demand measures, and to state the cut-off time for each. The uncertainty in such figures is a question of measurement uncertainty and of how statistical definitions are applied, not only of the size of the audience.

Place in Lunar New Year Customs

For many households the gala has become part of the evening's core routine, which centres on the reunion dinner and the late-night vigil. The reunion dinner is widely described as the most cheerful family event of the year, and on New Year's Eve the whole family stays awake to welcome the new year, a practice traditionally understood as bidding farewell to the old year and, in folk belief, adding longevity to one's elders. This vigil, known as shousui (守岁), has a long literary history. Xi Jinping's 2019 Spring Festival reception speech quoted the Tang poem "Staying Up Late" (《守岁》) to describe the same custom. Television now fills the vigil: many families gather around the television to watch the Spring Festival Gala, a special variety show broadcast annually on New Year's Eve.

Official Language and the "Cultural New Year's Eve Dinner"

Official discourse has taken up the metaphor of the reunion dinner. In the 2019 speech, Xi said that a family eating the New Year's Eve dinner and keeping vigil together enjoys domestic harmony and beauty of life, and that filial devotion at home and loyalty to the nation are traditions of the Chinese people. A 2022 Xinhua commentary on the Chinese New Year used the same logic for the gala, calling it another rich cultural New Year's Eve dinner, one that has been held for decades and has become a customary observance. The phrase "spiritual New Year's Eve dinner" (精神年夜饭) appears in Chinese media with the same sense; it places the programme alongside the family table as a shared, symbolic meal. Scholars generally read such language as part of the state's effort to tie a popular ritual to family and national identity, rather than as a neutral description of audience habits.

Everyday Language and Shared Phrases

The gala has supplied phrases that circulate far beyond the broadcast. The most durable example is comic actor Feng Gong's greeting, "I miss you guys so much!" is probably the most classic line from the comedy sketch artist Feng Gong. He has performed on the gala for 33 years, and his greetings have become a must-hear line that makes audiences laugh every time. Xiao Shenyang's 2009 sketch gave a different kind of phrase: the defining line from "I Got the Money," where Xiao Shenyang plays a waiter trying to impress a famous producer, became a national slang for feigned or real wealth. Such lines are often repeated at dinner tables, in online banter and in everyday jokes, which is one reason sketches matter to the gala's place in New Year culture as much as its ratings do.

Regional and Generational Differences

Viewing habits vary by region. In northern China, dumplings are the traditional midnight food: families traditionally eat jiaozi, which symbolise the transition between the old and new year. In the south, tangyuan (glutinous rice balls) are preferred, symbolising family unity and togetherness. Chinese media accounts often present the gala as a point of commonality across these traditions, but they also note that tastes differ; one commentary observes that for many people in the north, watching the gala with parents while eating dumplings is the simplest and most intense happiness of New Year's Eve, while southern families share the same programme around a lively reunion dinner.

Generational change is more visible in how families watch. Older viewers often describe a single television set in the living room as the centre of the evening, while younger households may split attention across phones and tablets. The digital age has added online interaction to the ritual: people watch the gala, send and receive digital red envelopes, and stay connected virtually through the night. The result is a form of shared viewing that is less uniform than in earlier decades, with the same programme experienced in multiple screens and social settings within a single household.

Technical Evolution and Interaction

The programme has been a live variety show since its first edition went out in February 1983, a format that has been carried live ever since. Its distribution has also multiplied. Starting in the 1990s, it reached the Chinese diaspora on CCTV-4, and dedicated simulcasts for foreign viewers have run on CGTN since 2016. By 2020 the reach had broadened further, with a dedicated 8K channel, public large-screen broadcasts, and new media platforms in 68 languages, according to the producer's plan for that year.

Audience interaction

Audience participation began with modest devices. The 2012 edition dropped its announcements of embassies overseas sending New Year's greetings, as well as the "My Favorite New Year's Gala Act" voting announcement. The turning point came in 2015, when WeChat introduced a shake-to-win feature during the broadcast and letting viewers "grab" digital red envelopes simply by shaking their phones. Data shows WeChat users shook their phones 11 billion times that night. In the following year Alipay used the on-screen character for "Fu" (fortune) as its trigger.

From about 2020 the model became a commercial contest among platforms. The sponsor pays for a red-envelope pool, and the host prompts viewers to take part on air. Official figures cited in press reports put Kuaishou's 2020 interactions at 63.9 billion, and Douyin's 2021 total at 70.3 billion. The 2022 JD.com interactions reached 69.1 billion times, a number that dropped significantly compared to previous years. Interaction in 2026 moved toward AI tools: users had to generate this avatar or New Year's greeting using a large model on Doubao before they could grab a red envelope, which added heavy computing demand to the older network costs. On the bullet-comment side, an exclusive bullet-screen video platform was announced for the 2025 edition.

Ultra-high-definition and immersive production

The 2020 edition combined 5G and 8K for the first time. CMG adopted 5G+8K technology to realize multi-camera shooting and produce an 8K gala. That year also introduced a virtual network interactive system, which demonstrated how the VNIS technology realizes interaction between hosts and guests. In 2021 the show was livestreamed in 8K, and it aired simultaneously on more than 30 8K Ultra HD big screens in public places in over 10 Chinese cities. Stage work used a virtual 3D space: the location data of the performers is provided by the camera tracking system, and the dynamic virtual scene is presented on the LED screens in real time. In 2025, augmented-reality aerial effects were placed across 5 broadcast locations, linking the Beijing headquarters to remote sites.

Vertical screens and multi-platform viewing

Vertical-format live streaming began in 2022, opening up a brand-new perspective for Chinese people around the world. Its audience grew quickly. The vertical format garnered 130 million, 190 million, and 420 million views, respectively, in the three preceding years before 2025, and in 2025 the vertical-screen feature garnered 496 million views. For 2026, Douyin was named the exclusive vertical-video live streaming partner, which indicates how the distribution has shifted towards commercial platforms.

AI, robotics and accessibility

The 2021 production was described as following a "5G+4K/8K+AI" strategy. Robotics became more prominent in later editions; the 2026 edition featured humanoid robots, and one developer said its product was independently developed and iterated through three versions in two months for the Spring Festival Gala. Accessibility has become a production goal. The 2025 edition added barrier-free broadcasts in versions for the visually impaired and the hearing impaired, with AI Speech Technology for subtitle generation. The producer reported that as many as 52 million people benefited from the accessibility features in the broadcast.

Measurement systems

Audience totals are assembled from several sources. The producer reports figures for live and on-demand plays across its own and partner platforms, so a count taken at one moment is not comparable with a later one. For example, the 2025 new-media count stood at 2.13 billion views as of 8:00 AM on 29 January, while preliminary statistics published later gave 2.8 billion views. Because the broadcaster compiles these numbers, their definitions and cut-off times matter when they are compared with other sources.

International Dissemination and Multilingual Broadcast

The gala's overseas reach began in 1986, when China Radio International (CRI) began broadcasting the Spring Festival Gala in foreign languages to overseas audiences, marking the first step in the Gala's international dissemination. Foreign-language service was therefore a radio project before it became a television and online one. Today the international side of the programme is handled mainly by CGTN, which is a foreign communication platform with 85 language channels including English, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Russian.

Official figures for overseas coverage vary by source, and the differences matter. For the 2026 edition, CGTN's multilingual services partnered with multilingual platforms in 85 languages and worked with more than 3,500 media outlets in over 200 countries and regions. A separate CMG-linked statement given at promotional events abroad put the figure at more than 3,300 overseas media outlets in over 200 countries and regions. CCTV's international video news agency, working through alliances of regional broadcasting unions, described a different measure: its material would reach audiences in 181 countries and regions through more than 400 media organizations. These numbers count different things, such as outlets that carry the live feed, outlets that merely report on it, and alliance members. They are supplied by the broadcaster, and the material reviewed here does not include independent verification of them.

The live feed itself was carried by specific channels. In 2026, English, Spanish, French, Arabic and Russian channels carried the event live. The overseas audience is not only made up of foreign viewers. Overseas Chinese communities watched through satellite television and digital platforms, aligning their celebrations with those in China despite time differences. CMG's own framing presents this diaspora viewing as a way of bridging geographical distances and reinforcing a shared cultural identity. That is the broadcaster's interpretation; independent audience research on how diaspora households actually use the broadcast is limited in the sources reviewed here.

Since 2024, CMG has also staged events abroad under the name "Prelude to the Spring Festival Gala". The 2026 edition followed its 2024 debut and was the third consecutive year of the event being held in Manhattan. The New York event, held on 13 February 2026, drew around 300 guests, including diplomats to the United Nations, representatives of UN agencies, and friends from cultural, economic, and media sectors of China and the United States. Some reports place the event at United Nations headquarters, while a press release describes it as taking place in Midtown Manhattan. The programme included the New York City Children's Choir and American singers performed classic Chinese and English songs, while the US National Youth Wushu Team dazzled with martial arts displays. Similar preludes were held elsewhere, including in Serbia, France, and New Zealand, and in Moscow, where an event brought together more than 1,000 people for cultural exchange.

Foreign performers have become a more visible part of the main programme. The 2026 chief director, Yu Lei, said that this year boasts the most abundant contents in terms of international design. The 2025 edition had already included a set by the American band OneRepublic, which marked a rare English-language set at China's most-watched TV event. The same year's show also featured a cross-cultural musical collaboration, with Chinese and Peruvian singers performing "Condor and Lan Huahua". In 2026, a joint acrobatic act blended Chinese techniques with international choreography, presenting artists from different countries on the same stage. Organisers present such segments as part of an effort to present dialogue between civilisations through performance. How far these foreign segments serve audiences abroad, as opposed to domestic audiences, is a question the available sources do not settle.

Criticism, Debate and Changing Audiences

Repetition, quality and the question of centrality

Criticism of the gala is long-standing and has come from commentators, online users and scholars alike. The most frequent complaint is that the format changes little from year to year. Commentators have said that younger viewers mock the show's supply of dated jokes and token celebrities, which they see as an older relative straining to seem fashionable (The show is also the subject of ridicule from the younger generation, who see the unending supply of dated jokes and token celebrities as reminiscent of an elderly uncle trying just a bit too hard to be hip.). Official commentary has answered such criticism by welcoming "constructive" feedback and presenting the criticism as a sign that public taste is maturing (a commentary in the Party's mouthpiece newspaper welcomed constructive feedback, and said that criticism of a show striving to be fashionable was a sign that aesthetic tastes were advancing with society).

The debate has also been shaped by moderation. After the 2018 broadcast, users on Sina Weibo found that searches for "Spring Festival Gala complaints" had been blocked, a sign that regulators were concerned about the scale of online backlash (Two hours after the 2018 gala concluded, users on Sina Weibo discovered they were prohibited from searching for "Spring Festival Gala complaints." The show was so heavily criticized the year before that media regulators had to censor online criticism.). An article rounding up the most common criticisms was later removed from Sixth Tone's website, and the outlet did not explain why (Now, an article rounding up the most widespread criticisms on the state-funded English-language news website Sixth Tone is no longer available.).

Scholars have framed the decline in structural terms. Xie (2022) links the weakening of collective family television viewing to the rise of internet and mobile media, and argues that the gala has become harder to sustain its former prominence (The popularity of Internet and mobile media in China has weakened the collective TV viewing culture in Chinese families. Behind the decline of television, the Spring Festival Gala is hard to maintain its glory and is gradually being questioned and challenged.).

Regional and generational divides

Published survey data on regional tastes are scarce, so the complaint that the gala reflects northern preferences more than southern ones rests mainly on commentary and on general travel-guide observations. One travel guide states that viewership in southern China has tended to decline gradually (Therefore, the viewership in southern China has tended to decline gradually.), but it offers no underlying data. Treating this as a demonstrated pattern would go beyond the available evidence.

Generational change is better documented. A 2025 commentary described the gala as having lost many younger viewers and as trying to reach audiences who are less accustomed to traditional television (The Gala has lost a lot of younger viewers, so this is one way to try and reach the audiences who are less used to watching traditional tv.). The broadcaster's response has included partnerships with Bilibili, a video platform popular with young users. Bilibili's own figures for the 2025 New Year's Eve live stream reported that over 100 million people watched the gala live on Bilibili, with 83% being young people under the age of 30. These figures come from the platform, and the age bands used in official reporting are broad. For example, CCTV-linked data cited for the 2024 gala described viewers aged 15 to 44 as making up 51.59% of viewers. The producers have also changed their casting, with more performers drawn from the short-drama industry (the Spring Gala is choosing to cast faces from different talent pools, and many more are coming from China's short drama industry.).

The Bilibili partnership itself became a subject of debate. A commentator quoted in a China Digital Times translation complained that the platform's comment stream during the broadcast was almost entirely positive, even for sketches that are usually panned (On a screen filled with comments, there wasn't a single "unforgiving" comment, only high praise. Even the frequently panned skits received rave reviews.). This raised the question of whether interactive features reflect real audience reactions or are curated.

Gender and ideological readings

Academic analysis of the skits has been one of the most developed areas of critique. A 2026 study of "soft" male characters argues that the gala uses entertainment to promote official gender discourses while being unable to fully control how audiences receive them. It traces a shift in which soft male figures were mocked in the 1980s and later became positively coded protagonists in the 2010s (While the Spring Festival Gala aims to propagandize official gender discourses and advocate masculine and tough male images through entertainment, it cannot completely control the messages or their reception). A separate mixed-methods study of 61 sketches broadcast between 2014 and 2024 found that women were often objects of ridicule, and that female directors and screenwriters formed a small minority, at 7.7% and 5.7% respectively during the decade (The study examines a sample of 61 short comedic pieces aired between 2014 and 2024. Women persist as objects of ridicule and social coercion. Female directors and screenwriters constitute a minority, representing only 7.7% and 5.7% respectively during the last decade.).

Specific editions have drawn criticism for both gender and ideological content. Some observers have argued that the gala resisted broader changes in gender norms and the rising social role of women, and the 2015 skit "Goddesses and Tomboys" drew particular online derision (Some observers have criticized the Gala for resisting larger trends in Chinese society, such as the increased role of women in society and changing gender norms. The 2015 skit "Goddesses and Tomboys" faced particular derision online for its portrayal of strong female roles in society.). Columnist Lin Jian's blunt verdict on the sketches is cited as an example of this commentary ("The sketches in the Spring Festival Gala are an annual climax of prejudice against women," wrote columnist Lin Jian on his Weibo.). Analyses of the gala's nationalist discourse tend to read the programme as a vehicle for patriotic sentiment and ethnic unity, a framing that scholars apply to particular editions rather than to the programme as a whole.

Research Approaches and Open Questions

Scholarship on the Spring Festival Gala draws mainly on media event theory. Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz's 1992 study of live television treats broadcasts of major occasions as ritual-like "world rituals" that can reshape how a society gathers and understands itself. Researchers working on China have applied this frame to the gala, reading it as a recurring ceremony in which a national audience shares one timetable and one set of performances. A closely related idea, the media ritual, focuses on the moment when media figures display their own importance before a non-media audience. Other scholars have used the notion of a "media tradition" to argue that the gala has become part of family festival practice, changing customs such as staying up on New Year's Eve rather than simply replacing them. These approaches draw on sociology and anthropology, and they often sit alongside structural-functionalist readings of social integration and conflict-theory readings of state power.

Work on national identity and representation is another major strand. Studies of the gala's staging of ethnic minorities, regional folk arts and migrant workers ask who is placed at the centre of the national picture and who appears at its edges. One study, for example, traces two decades of performances about rural migrants and examines how outsiders are brought into the ritual centre. Analyses of gender have looked at recurring roles in skits, hosts and song-and-dance numbers, while studies of commercialisation consider how sponsorship, market logic and platform partnerships reshape a programme that is nominally public. Such work is interpretive by design, and its conclusions depend heavily on which editions and which texts are chosen for analysis.

Methodological problems are substantial. Access to archives is limited, and many production records, including selection decisions and rehearsal revisions, are unpublished, so researchers often reconstruct the programme from broadcast footage and press accounts. Audience data present a further difficulty. The measurement methods behind headline figures have changed over time, and the definitions of viewing (live, on-demand, cross-platform, all-media) differ. Platform-supplied numbers are also self-reported. For example, Bilibili's statements that over 100 million people watched the 2025 live broadcast on its service, with 83% under 30, come from the company's own statistics rather than an independent audit. Researchers therefore need to treat such figures as partial evidence and to be explicit about measurement uncertainty, comparing series only where definitions match. More robust approaches draw on statistics and big data methods, but the underlying data remain controlled by the broadcaster and its partners.

The central open question concerns whether a single annual broadcast can keep its role as a shared ritual in a fragmented media environment. Some scholars argue that the spread of internet and mobile media has weakened collective television viewing in Chinese families, and that the gala's authority is increasingly contested. The programme has responded by moving onto platforms such as Bilibili, which offers danmu comments and interactive quizzes, and by casting younger performers. Yet alternative productions have also drawn attention: in 2026, a Bilibili channel featured a gala made by university students, and many young viewers were reported to be watching on their phones instead of in front of the television. Whether these efforts reconnect the gala with younger generations, or instead create parallel viewing communities, is not yet clear. Long-term studies of age, region and platform use will be needed to judge how the audience of the gala will change in the coming decades, and whether the digital divide between older and younger households will shape who continues to watch together.

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