Second of five articles

By Steven Mufson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, June 15, 1998; Page A1

BEIJING -- "Five, four, three," Ying Da says in Chinese as the actors on the set of his latest television show get into character. "Yubei, kaishi," he bellows. Ready, begin.

Dressed in Dockers slacks and a T-shirt with a picture of cartoon character Betty Boop astride a motorcycle, Ying Da sits behind the set in front of a small television. He whispers into a walkie-talkie to coach the woman upstairs who is controlling the camera angles.

Within moments he jumps up to interrupt the scene. He changes the position of one of the characters. He imitates a jealous, middle-aged woman to show an actress how he wants her to play her part. He moves a plant into the window and wonders if it looks too phony. Then he's ready to begin again. He walks backstage to his chair. "Yubei, kaishi!" he calls.

The filming of the upcoming series about a fictional Beijing psychiatric clinic and the hang-ups of modern Chinese is just the latest episode in the life of actor, director and producer Ying Da, 38. The maker of China's first situation comedy and the owner of China's first independent television production studio, Ying is one of the country's few genuine celebrities. At the restaurant where he has lunch before shooting begins, the owner asks for his autograph. On the street, sidewalk diners poke one another and utter his name in wonder.

His television career shows how culture in China in the 1990s is being transformed from propaganda to entertainment, from mass mobilization to commercialization, from Red Guard to avant-garde. The stiff poses of heroic revolutionary operas of Ying's youth have given way to experimental sculptures, movies, novels and television programs that try to make people laugh, cry and maybe even think.

Archie Bunker as Cadre

Already a well-known actor by the early 1990s, Ying made Chinese television history by directing a 1993 sitcom called "I Love My Family," a sort of "All in the Family" featuring a stodgy, old-fashioned Communist cadre as the Archie Bunker-like character struggling comically to adapt to the rapid changes and younger generation around him.

Offensive to propaganda department officials who identified with the cadre, "I Love My Family" was kept off Beijing stations but flourished on provincial cable stations. Last year, it was finally broadcast on Beijing television and garnered high ratings.

Communist China's history has already taken place once as tragedy, but are Chinese audiences ready for it to be repeated as farce?

"A lot of people don't take this seriously," said Ying, whose parents were leading players in the Beijing People's Arts Theater. "They even say it's lowbrow. But that's what theater is about. It's not just for the elegant people. In this country, Shakespeare is for the well-educated. But Shakespeare wrote for everybody."

And so while his more famous contemporaries, directors Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, have been making tortured and serious films applauded in international film festivals, Ying has been trying something equally difficult: making Chinese people laugh at and think about the problems of Chinese society.

"Ying Da is the best sitcom producer in China. He has blazed a trail for producing actual humor that's not just slapstick but is more cerebral," said Willie Brent, the Shanghai-based editor of a newsletter called China Entertainment Network.

To say that "I Love My Family" is empty is about as accurate as saying that "Seinfeld" was about nothing, or that Archie Bunker was an innocuous caricature.

"The Chinese need some things to laugh about. There have been precious few of those in the past 50 years," Brent added. "But Ying Da is also changing the way people think, really. Rather than hearing TV recount the amount of grain this or that province produced, he is producing shows that not only make you happy but make you think a little bit about families and situations in China today."

Adrift at 8

Ying's life could be the subject of a movie -- and part of it has been already. Director and actor Jiang Wen made a movie called "In the Heat of the Sun" that portrays a gang of mischievous youngsters abandoned during the Cultural Revolution when their parents are arrested or sent to the countryside. The movie was based on a real band of youths that included Ying.

Nothing in Ying's background would have pointed toward such a wayward existence. His great-grandfather and grandfather were distinguished educators; his great-grandfather founded the renowned Furen University, a Catholic university that later moved to Taiwan. Ying literally grew up in the theater, watching his parents onstage. Foreign plays were often performed.

But the start of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966 put an end to that. Under the leadership of Mao and his wife, the frustrated actress Jiang Qing, foreign plays were banned and theater groups were ordered to perform productions glorifying the Chinese revolution.

It was inevitable that Ying's father, Ying Ruocheng, would be arrested, though not until 1968. His mother was arrested at the same time. At 8, Ying Da drifted from relative to relative for meals and fell in with a gang of older kids who taught him to steal, fight and survive.

Jiang Wen's movie version of the group differed from most other films about the Cultural Revolution in that it portrayed the kids' life as fun. The parents were gone, school was out, and the kids were in charge.

"For almost four years, I led a Huckleberry Finn life," said Ying. "That was a treasure."

Not all of it was harmless, though. One classmate died in a gang fight. "It wasn't just playing around," Ying's father recalled. "It was serious."

"As a rule in stable societies, children are brought up according to certain precepts, moral codes, aesthetics," said Ying Ruocheng, as he sat in his spacious Beijing apartment surrounded by calligraphy done by the famous playwright Lao She and by leading Chinese educators from his grandfather's generation.

"It is something drilled into them by their parents and elders. I found my son and a lot of his friends missed that. So we have something rather unprecedented in China: a whole generation of people with no taboos."

Ying Da said, "That time really made me understand what life is, and it made me strong. If I can go through that, there is no trouble or pressure that I cannot stand."

Gaining Lost Ground

Once out of jail in 1972, Ying Ruocheng, set about getting his rebellious son back to books and studying. He bought a gramophone and played Beethoven. The elder Ying also found a friend who had been released from jail who took him to a Beijing bookstore's secret warehouse for banned books and got a copy of Chekhov's plays and short stories.

Ying Da, then 12, was hooked. By 1979, when university exams were held and universities reopened, the younger Ying tested into prestigious Beijing University.

Having learned English at home and at Beijing University, at the end of 1984 Ying went to work for four months at the Eugene O'Neill repertory theater in New London, Conn. Then he attended the University of Missouri at Kansas City, where his father had directed two plays. That was followed by half a year working for American movie director Alan Pakula, who was making the 1989 film "See You in the Morning."

But watching "The Cosby Show" was perhaps the most important influence on Ying. "I thought I should do something like that," he says.

He returned to China in 1988, well-prepared and well-connected. His father, who played the emperor in the 1987 Bernardo Bertolucci film "The Last Emperor," had become vice minister of culture.

The younger Ying landed a job with one of the country's leading mainstream filmmakers in Shanghai, then returned to the United States to work on a joint film production, "The Last Aristocrats."

Back in China, Ying played the theater manager in director Chen Kaige's internationally famous "Farewell My Concubine" in 1993, and he played a maladjusted Chinese student just returning from overseas in the hit Chinese miniseries "Fortress Besieged."

Tiananmen Disruption

Ying Ruocheng wanted his son to play a role in joint film productions between China and the West, but his plans were upset in 1989 by the massive student-led democracy protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square that shook the regime.

After the government ordered army troops to break up the protests and hundreds of civilians were killed in the crackdown, foreign companies stayed far away from China.

Ying Da was bitter. "I didn't like the government then, but on the other hand, I didn't like the students. They rushed too much and they didn't know what they were doing. If they hadn't done that, the whole government would have changed by evolution. But they wanted a revolution."

He said he was left "sitting here with all my English ability wasted." Nevertheless, he has produced and directed four sitcoms, two with live audiences and two with laugh tracks. He prefers live audiences because it makes the sitcoms more true to the stage tradition, though he believes the theater in China is dying.

"If Shakespeare were alive now, he would write sitcoms," Ying said.

Of course, if Shakespeare were writing sitcoms in China, he wouldn't be able to simply do them as he liked without causing much ado from the propaganda department. He'd find quite a few subjects off-limits. Poking fun at teachers is taboo. Making light of the police is also frowned upon.

A Sitcom Pushing Limits

Nonetheless, Chinese television is more open than ever. With government subsidies down and advertising revenues up, the propaganda department has trouble overruling the persuasive power of the market, even though it possesses final say.

Moreover, with the spread of cable TV, the number of stations has mushroomed to more than 2,000 and the demand for programming has grown. Ying's current project has been pre-sold to the country's biggest group of cable stations.

It is technically a soap opera. As such, it falls under a different set of rules, enabling him to deal with psychological problems that would be off-limits for comedy. In the 20-part series, a parade of people exhibit many of China's most common but least talked about neuroses and hang-ups.

In one scene, a well-to-do, middle-aged woman sits down in the clinic office. Her husband has been unfaithful, she says. She starts to recount his dalliances.

So he has been unfaithful three times?, the clinician asks her. Three? the woman shouts, crossing over to pound the desk. Three? Eight! "When you get to be my age," she tells the much younger woman, "you'll realize that all men are wolves."

But in the previous scene, the audience met the husband. He's a small, mousy old man, not exactly Don Juan. His wife has scratched his face in her jealous rages. Beware the green-eyed monster, the bard might have said.

"We are just going to have more than a hundred weird people walk in and out of that clinic," said Ying. "Some will just be normal people." In the process, China will see a cross section of itself. When he isn't filming, Ying teaches a course in drama at Beijing University. There he teaches the things he learned in the United States: textual analysis, body language, movement. The class has read the works of Moliere, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett and other classics of Western drama. Missing from the list: Chinese plays. "The youngsters don't like them," Ying said. "We haven't found anything suitable from Chinese tradition."

The Show Must Go On

Times have changed from his student days. Ying remembers biking back to campus from the theater with his friends and wondering why they weren't allowed to do Beckett's "Waiting for Godot." Last month, Ying and his whole class hopped into taxis to see a production of the play at the Capital Theater.

His students also have role models. "Now the students are crazy about certain things around them. They think what I'm doing is great. In my time, I don't remember wanting to be like anyone around me."

Now the question is, does Ying Da want to be Ying Da, or would he rather be someone else? His next sitcom will be called "Chinese Restaurant," about a Los Angeles takeout joint. Backed financially by Sony Corp., Ying will re-create an L.A. restaurant in his Beijing studio.

But he aspires to take on bigger subjects -- and bigger budgets. When "Titanic" was released, he saw it five times, three times in English and twice in Chinese. Ying Ruocheng, for his part, said he wishes his son would get back to the theater. What China needs, he said, is a Chinese version of Neil Simon.

Ying Da, however, said: "What I want to do could be politically dangerous. So I want to wait."

Meanwhile, there's a TV show that must go on. After a dinner break, he's back at the studio, where filming runs from 1 p.m. until 1 a.m. Luckily, he jokes, there is no union. A composer discusses the show's theme song. Ying wants it to be less pretty and more hummable. Then he rallies the cast members to take their places. Soon his voice echoes through the studio.

"Yubei. Kaishi," he calls. Ready. Begin.