The annual Spring Festival Gala aired on China’s state broadcaster CCTV this week, prompting wonder and worry at its display of kung fu-performing robots, and the traditional yearly storm of grumbling on Chinese social media. When CCTV reminded viewers that the show was under copyright, one Douyin user likened this to putting a lock on a septic tank. In turn, the carnival of mockery inspired the following post from WeChat public account Selling Apricot Blossoms, which bemoans the trend of watching the Gala purely to gather fuel for online disparagement. On the other hand, it also trashes the Gala itself, and voices widespread suspicions about China’s major national holidays as instruments of social control. The post claims that the Gala stands alongside China’s national soccer team as a rare safe target for online derision. There are limits to this safety, evidently: the post was deleted.

I don’t want to cast blame at others at New Year, so I’ll take some myself first. The last time I watched an entire Spring Festival Gala was back [in 1998] when fitness guru Ma Hua led a group of sons and daughters of the motherland through her "fatties can get thin, and beanpoles can get buffed" exercise routine.

I haven’t watched the Gala in ages, but each year I catch glimpses through friends roasting it on social media. It’s as if some of these serial Spring Gala victims know I can’t afford a TV, so they relay everything for me.

It’s like a metaphor from Orwell’s “Coming Up For Air”: the protagonist digs through a pile of terrible books in search of one worth reading, like a pig rooting through a garbage can in the hope of finding organic food.

The Spring Festival Gala and the national soccer team are the two safest sources of clicks on the Chinese internet. You can mock them without having to worry about cross-border detention.

But that’s precisely what’s so scary about the Gala. Curse it all you want, it’ll still keep roaring away like a high-power ideological blender, and it’ll pulverize your brain in the end.

Spring Festival is tightly bound up with national identity, though the agricultural calendar everyone follows is based on the Shixian calendar from the the late Ming and early Qing Dynasty, which was revised by the Western missionary Johann Adam Schall von Bell and others. And only a few decades ago, Spring Festival was one of the “Four Olds” that needed smashing.

There are certain countries where public holidays have become an instrument of state control over time. Those who determine the holidays and ceremonies certainly have their reasons for doing so.

Every Spring Festival, amid the hubbub of "rich or poor, everyone returns home," people’s memories get reset and revised. Negativity and dissatisfaction are stripped away and replaced like old gatepost decorations. Amid all the sights, sounds, and festivities of spring, it’s as if people have a new reason for accepting their fates.

Spring Festival is an inextricable part of this grand strategy. Early on, perhaps, the Gala still had some kind of communally festive air, but it has devolved into the year’s most-watched chive parade.

Now it’s all just stale jokes, self-indulgent wordplay, bad lip-synching, lifeless skits … the daily lives of Chinese people pounded and pinched into shape like festive New Year dumplings.

Not many of those commenting on the Spring Festival Gala in real time on my WeChat feed would be willing to admit that they’ve been duped yet again, but every year as soon as they’ve filled their bellies with the New Year meal, they take their positions on the sofa like fresh recruits lining up for inspection and conscription by the state broadcaster.

It’s understandable for content creators to sit through the whole thing in order to drum up traffic, but when ordinary people put themselves through it, bumping the Gala up the TV ratings and online trending topics, that’s nothing short of a DIY IQ reduction.

So, today and for the next few days, I hope to see less online content about the Spring Festival Gala, and more about “spring love and romance.” Even "spring tonics” [aphrodisiacs] would be better than this. [Chinese]