About Pearl River Channel

Pearl River Channel

The Pearl River Channel, in Chinese Zhujiang Pindao and listed as GDTV-2, is the Cantonese-language main channel of Guangdong Radio and Television, based in Guangzhou. Launched on 30 September 1983, it is the province's principal Cantonese general channel, broadcasting news, drama and entertainment in Cantonese for the Pearl River Delta. It is often called the first Cantonese channel, and its existence is exceptional in Chinese television: in 1988 the Ministry of Radio, Film and Television formally approved the use of Cantonese by Guangdong TV's Pearl River Channel and by Guangzhou TV, as a countermeasure against the influence of Hong Kong television in the Pearl River Delta. No other mainland provincial channel holds a comparable place as the authorised television voice of a major regional language.

Launch in 1983

Guangdong Radio and Television's channel table dates the Pearl River Channel to 30 September 1983, broadcasting in Cantonese by terrestrial, cable and IPTV in HD and SD. The launch created a two-language structure at Guangdong Television that older viewers in the province still remember: the satellite service, today's Guangdong Satellite TV, broadcasting in Mandarin to the nation, and the Pearl River service broadcasting in Cantonese to the province, the two independent of each other, each with its own characteristics. The Cantonese service took its name from the Pearl River, the river system of Guangzhou and the Delta, a name the station group also uses for its film studio and movie channel.

The 1988 Cantonese approval

Cantonese on mainland television exists by permission. Mandarin was made China's sole official language in 1982, and the use of other languages in television, radio and film is rigorously restricted by the national broadcasting regulator; permission from national or local authorities is required to use a dialect as the primary programming language of a station. In 1988, the Ministry of Radio, Film and Television approved the use of Cantonese by Guangdong TV in the Pearl River Channel and by Guangzhou TV. The reason recorded in accounts of the decision was competitive as much as cultural: Hong Kong's Cantonese channels, TVB and ATV, were widely watched in the Delta through spill-over signals and antennas, and an authorised mainland Cantonese service was a countermeasure against Hong Kong television's influence in the region. The Pearl River Channel was the mainland answer: Cantonese television made in Guangzhou, under mainland editorial control.

Programming and the Cantonese flavour

The channel broadcasts Cantonese news, drama and entertainment. In the 1990s, Pearl River Television insisted on the twin routes of Cantonese flavour and innovation, creating large variety shows such as Ten Thousand Purples and Thousands of Reds and morning programmes including Morning, Sports World and the game show Cash Cow, and establishing a brand of Guangdong production in the television industry. Its news became a fixture: the evening bulletin known in its modern form as Pearl River News Eye descends from the 630 News tradition, whose presenters, including Chen Shaohui, Jiang Xuehong and Xu Jie, were household names in Cantonese Guangdong. Sports has its own lineage: Li Weijian, who joined Guangdong Television's sports group in 1982, broadcast the Provincial Hong Kong Cup live in Cantonese in 1983, arguably the origin of live sports commentary in Cantonese on the mainland, at some professional risk to himself, and went on to host Sports World and Olympic Voice. Generations of presenters, among them Liu Jingdong of Cash Cow fame and the music graduate Wu Yan, who joined in 1997 after a Guangdong screen emcee competition, made the channel's faces part of provincial life.

Guangdong Radio and Television

The channel's owner, Guangdong Radio and Television, was formed on 23 April 2014 by the merger of Guangdong Television, Radio Guangdong, Southern Media Corporation and Television Broadcasting Southern, the TVS group. The company is owned by the Guangdong provincial government and operates nine radio channels, twelve free-to-air television channels and ten pay channels. In its line-up, GDTV-1 is Guangdong Satellite TV, the Mandarin main channel launched in its satellite form for national distribution, and GDTV-2, the Pearl River Channel, is the Cantonese main channel. They are followed by the sports, lifestyle and news channels and pay services including the Pearl River Movie Channel, the Cantonese film channel operated with Pearl River Film Studio from 30 December 2008 until its closure as a pay service in 2020. The Pearl River Channel is thus the senior terrestrial service of the provincial broadcaster, senior in continuous identity to the merged company that now owns it.

Language politics and the 2010 controversy

The value Guangdong audiences place on Cantonese television was demonstrated in 2010, in a controversy centred on Guangzhou TV in which the Pearl River Channel's 1988 settlement was the background. In July 2010 the Guangzhou committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference proposed increasing Mandarin programming on Guangzhou Television's main and news channels. About 10,000 people gathered near Jiangnanxi station on 25 July 2010 to support Cantonese, and global Cantonese-supporting assemblies followed in September. Guangzhou TV formally rejected the proposal, citing historic causes and present demands as reasons for Cantonese-Mandarin bilingualism. New provincial rules effective 1 March 2012 required officials, teachers and broadcast hosts to use Mandarin in public appearances and required permission for dialect programmes, but authorities confirmed that Cantonese use in daily life, and its authorised broadcasting, continued. The episode showed that channels like the Pearl River are not merely services but carriers of regional identity.

Audience and cultural role

Guangzhou is Guangdong's largest television market and China's second-largest; a 2007 study found that eight of the city's top fifteen channels carried some or all Cantonese programming and that the average Guangzhou adult watched about 200 minutes of television a day. Scholarship on Cantonese media describes the preservation of Cantonese television and film in Guangdong as the preservation of cultural heritage in south China's bidialectal landscape, in which Guangdong and Hong Kong entertainment industries grew up in a symbiotic relationship. The Pearl River Channel is the mainland institution at the centre of that landscape, remembered by audiences who grew up with it in the 1980s and 1990s as the first Cantonese channel and watched as a matter of linguistic loyalty as well as entertainment.

Distribution

The channel is distributed terrestrially, by cable and by IPTV across Guangdong, in HD and SD, broadcasting in Cantonese. Unlike TVS's satellite Cantonese service, which was permitted worldwide carriage, the Pearl River Channel is a provincial terrestrial service: its home is the Delta, Guangzhou, Foshan, Shenzhen and the Cantonese-speaking cities around them, together with cable carriage across the province. Its programmes are published through Guangdong Radio and Television's digital services at gdtv.cn.

Significance

Launched on 30 September 1983 and authorised in Cantonese in 1988, the Pearl River Channel is a unique institution in Chinese broadcasting: a provincial flagship whose language, not just its region, defines it. It was created to give the Pearl River Delta a mainland Cantonese television service in competition with Hong Kong, sustained a generation of Cantonese presenters, variety formats and news bulletins that remain reference points in Guangdong life, and stands as the clearest example of regional-language television surviving inside a national system built on Mandarin. Within Guangdong Radio and Television it remains, as GDTV-2, the Cantonese main channel of the province.