U.S.-China rivalry enters a new sphere: Who can best carry a tune

The Chinese contestants on Singer 2024, however, looked less excited when the camera cut to backstage. Lambert was showing them up with his pitch-perfect live performance, and if Lambert won, one of them stood to be eliminated.

Some viewers joked on social media that Lambert had come to start a “bloodbath” and teach China’s music industry a lesson.

Singer 2024 is a Eurovision-style singing competition where the performers are rated by a jury of 1,000 judges, both Chinese and international.

It positions itself as a “truly international music stage” that showcases diverse styles and facilitates cultural exchanges, according to Zhang Danyang, executive director of the program. This fits into top leader Xi Jinping’s call to promote mutual learning among civilizations and to strengthen people-to-people ties between China and the United States.

But that ambition sometimes goes awry and even a music show can turn into a geopolitical showdown between East and West.

Chinese audiences are used to a high level of lip-syncing and auto-tuning in their “live” performances. Singers on the state broadcaster’s must-watch Spring Festival gala have long been accused of lip-syncing on the show and a hit musical in 2019 was found to have played a prerecorded tape for the leading actress who got sick.

Chinese regulations penalize lip-syncing in ticketed concerts and other commercial performances, but they don’t apply to TV and web shows.

That made Singer 2024 a rarity because all its performances are live and unedited, and established artists vie to be the best live performer. This has won approval from viewers and reviewers: the first episode alone garnered 135 million views in 24 hours after its premiere, sending the shares of the parent company soaring.

The show’s decision to go live is “the right thing to do” and has “raised the bar” for other Chinese shows, said Chinese-Canadian music producer JKAI (Jay-Kai), who joined remotely as an international jury member for the first episode. “In previous years, none of it was like really this live.”

The show features seven competitors — four Chinese, one Taiwanese, one American and one Moroccan-Canadian — and one-off guest performers like Lambert. A producer for the show said many Chinese artists they approached didn’t have the “capability” and “guts” to sing live.

The American contestant is Chanté Moore, a 57-year-old R&B singer from San Francisco. Moore “exudes the kind of ease, freedom and genuineness that you don’t see very often here,” said Celeste Hua, a 30-year-old resident in Shanghai.

Hua became a fan after Moore performed “If I Ain’t Got You,” by Alicia Keys with a flex: she added some Mariah Carey-style high notes into her powerful rendition.

As if to show she was aware of her vocal superiority, Moore said in a widely circulated behind-the-scenes interview that she thought she was joining the show as a judge, not a singer.

The other Westerner, Faouzia, a 24-year-old from Canada with Moroccan heritage, has gained a loyal following for her use of opera skills and Arabic music elements in pop songs. Moore and Faouzia have consistently been in the top three.

The Chinese performances have not been as consistent.

Silence Wang, one of the country’s best-selling recording artists, struggled with high notes. The folksy chanting of Liang Long, the lead singer of alternative rock band Second Hand Rose, has drawn comparison to a disturbing shamanic ritual.

After a Chinese singer who has enjoyed three decades of popularity, Na Ying, delivered a relatively solid performance in the first episode, viral memes caricatured her as a one-person army besieged by foreign forces.

The lopsided nature of the contest has sparked a wave of nationalist sentiment about a show that was meant to be pure entertainment.

Music critic Zou Xiaoying wrote online that the Singer show “is no Olympics” and, “I’m not going to vote for any foreigners no matter how good they are.” “Also, are they really that good?” he asked, in a post that got 67,000 likes.

Ardent fans of the show, disappointed with the Chinese performers, have appealed to other local singers who they believe have a vocal versatility on par with Moore and Faouzia, in hope of reinforcing Team China and upholding “national honor.” More than a dozen singers expressed interest.

“I’m Chinese singer Han Hong. Send me to battle!” a People’s Liberation Army-affiliated musician with 16 million followers wrote on Weibo, tagging the official Singer account. Her post got 1.5 million likes and further ignited nationalist sentiments.

The show’s production team thanked fans for the unsolicited brainstorming and the singers who volunteered before urging everyone to focus on music, friendship and communication instead of winning.

State media outlets have also weighed in.

Elevating an entertainment topic to a level of “geopolitical fight is both misleading and not fun,” state-run Chengdu Economic Daily wrote in a commentary. The People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the ruling Communist Party, commented that “there’s no need to overplay the rivalry” despite the Chinese and the two foreign singers being mismatched in live performance.

While “nationalism sells,” said Sara Liao, a media scholar at Penn State University, commercial television channels have to practice caution because they face “the risks of repercussion simultaneously” from the government, which decides what can air, and from public scrutiny.

The Singer show in fact has its genesis in geopolitical conflict.

It was originally called “I Am a Singer,” based on a South Korean show of the same name. But when South Korea opted in 2017 to deploy the U.S. missile defense system THAAD, an upset China banned K-pop acts and the show rebranded itself. Also in 2017, Hong Kong singer Hins Cheung was kicked off the show for allegedly supporting the independence movement, an accusation he denied.

Moore’s chances of winning grew slimmer with last week’s episode, when she came in last after her rendition of Beyoncé’s “Halo”.

But if she or Faouzia win, like when British singer Jessie J became the first international winner on the show in 2018, it would be more about their talent, voice and artistry than their fame, said Rozette, a Canadian singer and vocal coach who has been commenting on the show in her YouTube channel.

“The role of those [foreign] artists, I guess, is to be a juxtaposition, to show the different palettes from different cultures,” Rozette said in an interview. “At the end of the day, they are there to be and represent a different sound: Pop music from America might as well be world music to many Chinese ears.”