Spring Festival gala is good as it is

French film personality Sophie Marceau and South Korean actor and singer Lee Min-ho have been invited as guests to the most-viewed Spring Festival television gala on Lunar New Year's Eve, sparking a public controversy.

There is nothing wrong in inviting foreign stars as guests on China Central Television's Spring Festival gala, especially because a huge number of Chinese have fallen to the charms of foreign celebrities, and foreign fashion and music since China introduced reform and opening-up more than three decades ago.

But the invitations extended to foreign stars have more to do with business than the evolution of culture in China. And it is precisely business that the CCTV gala's producers do not seem to understand, for they may not succeed in attracting a foreign audience by inviting foreign stars to their show.

Reports say a CCTV gala last year featured only foreign artists. What was the program supposed to show: That Spring Festival had become international? That is not likely to be, and that is the way it should remain.

Growing up in Canada, I was fond of the annual Bye Bye show, which used to review the passing year. The program was conducted by Les Cyniques, who were very clever at and innovative in their analyses of the events of the past 12 months. After a few years, I as well as some others lost interest in the program, and Bye Bye 1990 was the last I saw. The program was later stopped, because most of the viewers considered it a waste of time.

The content of the Canadian program was very different from the CCTV gala, which is an album of the different aspects of Chinese culture. I watched the CCTV gala during my first few years in China but stopped doing so because it was too repetitive: A big show with the same content year after year.