Super Voice Girls 超级女声

Super Voice Girls is the name of a televised singing competition similar to American Idol, produced and broadcast by the state-owned Hunan Province Satellite Television Station. The pro- grams full name is Mengniu Yoghurt Super Voice Girls — Mengniu being one of Chinas leading dairy product brands.

    The TV program has sparked a nationwide mania. Super Voice Girls has attracted more than 150,000 young female participants while more than 20 million people watch the program every week, comprising more than 10 percent of all TV viewers during the programs time slot. More than 100 newspapers have written extensive stories about Super Voice Girls; Google returns more than a million results for a search on the programs Chinese name.

    The first season of Super Voice Girls aired in ～. The final of the second season — in which three finalists fight it out to become the champion Super Voice Girl —  They are Zhou Bichang, Zhang Liangying and Li Yuchun.

    The ～ competition started with a primary round involving 10,000 girls, each of whom only had 30 seconds to perform. TV viewers voted by sending SMS messages to the TV station. After the primary round, each program became a knockout competition along familiar reality TV lines.

    One of the reasons the program has been so popular is that there were almost no requirements for Regis- tration: any female who could sign up, regardless of where they came from, how they look and how they sing.

    “The low threshold for registration  enables more and more girls with dreams to find a stage of their own”, said Wang Ping, the general director of the program. For participants, the most attractive part of Super Voice Girl is that after the competition, the program’s sponsors will invest in the winners, promising them album deals and roles in TV series.

The candidates:

    Most Chinese media gave extensive coverage to Super Voice Girls, with detailed introductions to the five candidates — Zhou Bichang, He Jie, Zhang Liangying), Li Yuchun and Ji Minjia. Aside from Zhou Bichang who comes from a town near Guangzhou, all of them are from Sichuan.

    Li and Zhou are similar in their boyish images, performance skills and singing styles. They are also both very popular with audiences. Li always performs male vocals and has consistently got the highest numbers of SMS votes. He Jie has stage presence, but her singing performance is average. He Jie has also been said to have already made a market value for herself of 1 million yuan. Zhang Liangying is considered to sing with her soul and is good at performing English songs. She also has a beautiful face, sexy figure and feminine personality which is a big plus for her. Ji Minjia has the greatest vocal range, but her lack of stage charisma mades her the least popular amongs the shows SMS voters.