Yang Lan
song written by Janet Noh
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honored in partnership with Her Village Foundation
Yang Lan is a Chinese businesswoman and television journalist known for her focus on social and cultural issues.
The daughter of two professors, Yang in 1990 received a bachelor’s degree in the English language from Beijing Foreign Studies University. That same year she was chosen from among 1,000 applicants as the winner of the open audition at China Central Television—China’s only nationwide television network—which secured her a position with the weekly Zheng Da Variety Show, China’s top-rated talk show from 1990 to 1993. As cohost of the show, Yang focused attention on such issues as the economic tensions among families in China’s growing middle class, avoiding the sensationalism and steamy revelations that she said characterized American talk shows. She did not seem to chafe under the programmatic control of her government employers, Chinese state television, and she told Newsweek magazine, “In my personal view, certain censorship is important, since nations have different social and cultural backgrounds. I certainly have enough room to move around in my programs.”
In 1993 Yang was awarded China’s Golden Microphone Award for television hosts. Her efforts landed her a place among the country’s most popular celebrities, and she served as master of ceremonies on many occasions, including the opening ceremony of the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995 in Beijing. In 1996 Yang was awarded a master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia University in New York City. She had attracted so little attention to herself that her classmates had no idea of her high profile in the Chinese media.
Upon her return to China in 1996, Yang launched a new documentary show called Yang Lan’s Horizon. It examined the cultural ties between the United States and China, exploring topics such as the parallels between Broadway musicals and jingxi, known in English as Peking opera. At the outset her new program had approximately 200 million viewers. Yang was concerned with the need to improve Chinese television by having it develop more of its own shows and rely less on imports from the United States. While she believed Chinese television could produce good shows to replace the American ones, however, her hope was to “promote the bond between the two countries, instead of breaking them up.”
From 1998 to 1999 Yang served as creator, executive producer, and anchor for Phoenix Satellite Television. The following year she cofounded Sun Television Cybernetworks (SunTV), the first satellite channel in Greater China to focus on history and culture. In 2005 Yang founded the Sun Culture Foundation to promote education, raise awareness about poverty, and encourage cultural communication.