Great Work out of Great Efforts
By Xu Qian, deputy director of News Center, CCTV
During the Labor's Day, CCTV broadcast its key program of Great Country Craftsmen, After its debut in Morning News channel, the eight-episode program was rolled out in different columns of the news channel. CCTV News allotted a total of 39 minutes out of its compact content arrangement to broadcast a short version of the 8 episodes, i.e., paying its tribute to the great craftsmen of the country with its most valuable resource.
The planning of Great Country Craftsmen started on April 14, 2015, when NieChenxi the president of CCTV conducted a research at the CCTV Center and talked with the staff. He put forward the requirements of strengthening “Four awareness” and realizing “Four transitions” to enhance the quality of news propaganda of CCTV. The International Labor’s Day was not a quite hotspot event for CCTV. In this occasion, routine reports on domestic and international news, holiday and outing events and model workers of China would generally suffice. However, leaders of CCTV required that we should do more and do better. Sun Yusheng, the vice president of CCTV proposed that news report during Labor’s Day shall be treated as a special task and the first transition of the “Four transitions”. He pointed out that in-depth research and design shall be conducted to make Great Country’s Craftsmen more unique.
I Advocating craftsmanship: A proper theme of far-reaching significance
The theme planning for Labor’s Day is in itself a big theme, and depth of thinking of the planners is directly related with the height of the program. The News Channel of CCTV plays a vital guiding role in advocating the core socialism values. Centering on the theme of labor, we decided to start with the labor values which should not be, but were actually neglected. Nowadays, many people no longer hold the belief that “every trade has its champion”. Instead of striving to become more capable in work, many people lack patience to improve themselves but are overly concerned with material wealth. In many industries, there lacks technical talents with a down-to-earth attitude and dedication to perfection in their professions. Our time calls for a return to the plain labor spirit and less pompousness in the society.
In China’s education system, the main obstacle of the development of vocational education is that people’s opinion of technical talents still need to be improved. By focusing on the excellent models of this group, we can have more people realize that the vocational education can create top level talents who can even be regarded as a nation’s treasure. After an in-depth analysis, the theme of the program became clearer, i.e., guiding the public opinion on craftsmanship, making more people to respect craftsmanship and pursue expertise in their fields, and advocate a social trend of respecting diligent and creative work.
After we decided upon the theme of Great Country's Craftsmen, what awaited ahead were how to carry out it with positive feedback. Firstly, we should decide currently which industries in China deserved the “Great Country” status. Secondly, we should come up with the criteria of “Craftsmen”. In our opinion, the program Great Country’s Craftsmen should focus on the two opposite concepts of “big” and “small”, i.e., big industries with inspiring achievements and “small” figures with touching stories. At the early stage of our planning of the program, we had the firm belief that throughout the course of civilization of several thousand years, there did not lack the inheritance and advocation of craftsmanship in China. Rather, what we lack was discovery, i.e., to discover the top craftsmanship in contemporary manufacturing industries, reveal the high quality of “Made-in-China”, explore the craftsmanship spirit of modern workers and tell their touching stories. Our reporters and editors, who have long been concerned and keeping up with related fields, quickly found their subjects of shooting. By exploring eight of top and brand industries, we discovered the top talented technicians working in their respective fields. Apart from their talent and expertise, they have come up with innovations, contributing to the development of their fields. What is more, they all have profound feelings towards the motherland.
II Improving the operation mechanism: exercising strict control to produce quality products......
