106 Wanning Sun
Unlike Channel Young’s Weddings, however, many lifestyle programs that
do touch on green topics and themes do not actively push a pro-environment
discourse. Instead, the focus of these programs is often the consumers’ body and
health. Narratives are mostly geared toward the question of how individuals can
stay healthy or even beautiful in a polluted environment or how they can protect
themselves from unsafe food, water, and toxic air. These shows betray a fatalist and
defeatist view of individuals’ capacity to save the Earth, yet at the same time they
emphasize the need for individuals to develop coping mechanisms, in particular
the need to strengthen the body, which is increasingly at risk and under attack. The
health of the individual body, rather than the health of the environment, forms the
central concern of such lifestyle advice.
In other words, rather than positively promoting what actions can be taken
collectively to work toward a greener environment or to adopt an environmentally
responsible lifestyle in one’s own consumption practices, lifestyle programs
mostly function as a “survival kit” for viewers eager to learn how to live optimally
in an environment that is no longer “green”. Cosmetic and beauty advice aside,
this “how to survive the environmental risk” theme has many narrative variants,
ranging from coping with air and water pollution and staying healthy, or detecting
counterfeit food products and staying safe, to renovating one’s apartment without
inhaling too many chemical vapors. These types of advice can be found in a variety
of lifestyle shows, including shows on cooking, renovation, fashion, and travel.
However, it is in the programs on health and well-being, which make up a significant
proportion of the lifestyle advice programs on local and provincial television, that a
connection between environmental issues and health risk is most explicitly made.
For instance, Zero Distance to Health, a local program on Bengbu Television
in Anhui Province in eastern China regularly presents consumer warnings and
advice on a wide range of products. An episode in early 2011, for instance, tells
viewers that a significant proportion of toys for sale in the shops pose health risks
of one kind or another. The program outlines—textbook-style and complete with
charts and tables—the risk to children’s health associated with toys on account of
unacceptably high levels of chemicals and noise or a lack of child-proofing in the
design, and so on. It suggests that consumers look for clues that identify unsafe
toys, including color, smell, design, and labeling. In its didactic style, the show
also presents the latest “scientific findings” relating to the potential health risks of
purchasing and using certain domestic appliances, of renovating the apartment, or
simply of everyday activities such as breathing air, drinking water, and eating food.
The widely agreed assumption behind these narratives is that individuals cannot
do much to change the environment they live in; all they can do is change the way
they live their lives so that they maximize their chance of survival.
If more “parochial” local television stations such as Bengbu TV approach
environmental issues by providing viewers with basic knowledge aimed at self-
protection, are high-end consumer advice shows on national or metropolitan
channels more “enlightened”, and do they approach these issues from a less self-
serving point of view? A general survey of the content of some such programs
suggests perhaps not. Popular Eats (Renqi Meishi) on Shanghai’s Channel Young,