Company Year-End Parties Are Turning into the Spring Festival Gala

"Prose should be written for its times, and poems and songs composed for real events."

– Bai Juyi

If I'm going to talk about year-end parties and the Spring Festival Gala together, I have to start with how my feelings about the Gala changed.

When I was little, I genuinely loved watching the Gala, especially Zhao Benshan's comedy sketches. Even now, every so often I dig up a compilation of all his Gala sketches and watch them. True classics never get old.

These days, I don't even know how many years it's been since I last watched the Gala. The last Gala sketch I can name is Shen Teng's "To Help or Not to Help."

Of course, I don't think it's just me. I'm sure plenty of people haven't watched the Gala in years, and the internet is flooded with posts about how it gets worse every year.

In this post I want to compare year-end parties with the Gala. Year-end parties getting more and more pointless and the Gala getting worse and worse may have something in common.

And it's actually not hard to find. It comes down to one question: who is it for?

If the Gala used to be praised for being something you could watch while cracking sunflower seeds, today's Gala has succeeded in getting people to set up card tables in front of the TV, playing cards, shooting the breeze, and chatting together.

The Gala is something I put on, not something I watch.

The Gala is certainly a high-profile production, but it feels less and less like something made for ordinary people.

First, it's too fake.

Take the "making dumplings" meme that shows up online every year as New Year approaches. Why does it exist? Because with the Gala's sketches and comedy routines now, however they start and whatever happens in the middle, the ending is always a "making dumplings" ending, the big happy reunion, and it might well get lifted to the level of the national spirit while it's at it.

What's it like? It's like scrolling onto a great movie recap video: "This man's name is Xiaoshuai." You follow him through a series of gripping twists, and then at the end of the video, you get hit with a hard-sell ad.

As people online put it, it's "luring you in for the kill."

Second, it's too political.

I remember a sketch called "Playing to Their Tastes," also by Shen Teng. That one still counts as good. It was really funny, but you could clearly tell it was a piece about corruption.

The sketches after that weren't just bad. They often forced in all kinds of grand political themes, including but not limited to poverty alleviation, honoring the military, unity between the army and the people, a community with a shared future for mankind, and so on.

After a whole year of hard work, I sit down in front of the TV and this is what you show me? Is this even meant for me?

Year-end parties work the same way. Compared with the Gala, they're on a much smaller scale. But being smaller isn't a plus for year-end parties. It's what makes them so sad.

Why sad?

Unlike the Gala, which is planned and designed from the start of each year with countless teams of professional artists working on it, year-end parties are planned and run by ordinary employees who have real jobs of their own.

Everyone is busy.

Everyone already has KPIs to carry, and the year-end party becomes a heavy burden on top of their actual job. It's not just a personal thing either. Pull one thread and the whole thing moves. Nobody wants to put their heart into it, because everyone knows it's just a show staged for the bosses.

A year-end party planned under these conditions can't be judged as good or bad anymore. Everyone just wants to go home and rest early.

There's work tomorrow, after all.

Luckily, this year my company finally stopped holding a year-end party.

That's probably the best year-end bonus I got this year.

In "Silent China," Lu Xun wrote: "The Chinese are given to compromise and the middle way. For instance, if you say this room is too dark and a window should be made here, everyone is sure to refuse. But if you propose taking off the roof, they will compromise and be willing to make a window."

Today's Gala and year-end parties are like that dark room, patched up again and again to keep things the way they are.

Honestly, as viewers and employees, we couldn't care less whether the roof comes off. We just need someone to open a window and let in a little real light.