Nick's Cultural Revolution

By DAVID BARBOZA |The New York Times
December 29, 2005

SHANGHAI, Dec. 28 - When Nickelodeon's popular "Kids' Choice Awards" program came to China last month, the producers were forced to make some serious modifications. There would be no voting on favorite burp. Nor would children judge which movie character was the best at breaking wind.

There was, however, sliming, a highlight of the American version of the show, which involves dumping, squirting and otherwise propelling green gooey stuff at people. And adults repeatedly were whacked by children - with balloon bats, of course - just to give the Chinese a taste of the freedoms afforded to children in the United States.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the show's national television broadcast was that children in China seemed to think that even this much kinder, gentler version of the program was wonderfully, outrageously transgressive.

"This is just so much fun," said Wang Yinong, a shy 12-year-old girl who watched the show at home with her parents in Shanghai. "I'd really like to go there and do the same thing: slime people."

Sliming remains a novelty in China. While every American industry that comes here faces its own obstacles, the bar that exporters of children's television programming must vault is particularly high: a traditional culture of respect for parents and authority reinforced by decades of Communist discipline and the ruthless competitiveness of an educational system that favors rigor over imagination.

Still, Viacom, which dominates youth-oriented programming in the United States and other parts of the world with its MTV and Nickelodeon networks, is aggressively courting Chinese youngsters, hoping to introduce them to its brand of playfully antiauthoritarian programming. After all, China has roughly 300 million people younger than 14, and Viacom executives warm to the idea of capturing even a sliver of a demographic that now exceeds the population of the entire United States.

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