Jessie J’s cultural revolution: how a Middle-Grade Pop Monster saved China

Well, it was the power ballad heard around the world – by which I mean heard in a variety of Asian emerging markets, but not the UK. Anyway, Jessie J has won a Chinese TV singing competition! Not since Deng Xiaoping’s government allowed Bernardo Bertolucci to use the Forbidden City for The Last Emperor has a Chinese cultural engagement with the west felt quite so epic.

Think of Jessie as The Last Empress. God knows, she does. I’m kidding, I’m kidding. It has been a few years since madam was explaining how her broken foot had given her “a different respect now for people who don’t have legs”. Still, let’s give the classic interview another hop-out.

“Just after I broke my foot,” Jessie told Q magazine, “I was in the living room and I put on Beyoncé’s Save the Hero. Like, ‘If I’m not around, who saves the superhero?’ You give so much as an artist – you give, you give, you give. I break my foot and I’ve got fans going: ‘I’ve got a tummy ache, can I get a retweet?’ People think you go to a special hospital, get special casts and treatment. It’s like: ‘No, I’m the same as everyone else,’ and that was the moment when I had a proper cry.”

I don’t mind admitting I cry in a happy way every time I reread that quote. Touring the vast Lost in Showbiz archive facility earlier today, I see I had filed Jessie away in a section entitled Middle-Grade Monsters of Pop. Although this latest Chinese escapade doesn’t require her to be formally reclassified, I think we can bump her up to her own dedicated shelf.

But first, a recap: for the past three months, popstar and former Voice judge Jessie J has been in China competing in a televised singing competition called Singer. Contrary to many reports, this is not the equivalent of The X Factor. All the singers competing are established, so it is rather less horrendous than Jessie J twerking in professionally to pluck the opportunity away from an angelic-voiced Chinese amateur, all the while singing that it’s not about the money, money, money. Or, indeed, the cha-ching cha-ching.

Here is Jessie’s version: “Last year, I was asked to compete in a singing competition in China. Performing alongside the biggest established singers/artists across Asia.”

Tantalisingly, the Do It Like a Dude legend doesn’t elaborate on how the request was communicated. For my part, I believe it to have been made in a bilateral Sino-British huddle during a session break of the UN security council. But I suppose it is conceivable they went via the record label. Either way, the message is that China actively wanted Jessie. She wasn’t just something atrocious we visited upon them, like the opium wars.

Why did Jessie say yes? “It was an opportunity to bridge a gap between two cultures,” she explains. “For them to see a western performer and hear music some had never heard before and vice versa.”

Can’t help feeling vice versa is doing some heavy lifting there. But Jessie seems determined to effect – how to put this? – a sort of cultural revolution, whereby Chinese people are improved and spiritually elevated via exposure to her personage. The show’s formal victory publicity material shows her posing in floor-length diamanté with an arched eyebrow and talking about learning experiences, an aesthetic I’m afraid I’m going to have to call “re-education high camp”.

“Seeing the boundaries break down,” Jessie goes on, “and the rules be shifted made this whole experience incredible … What we all won” – Oh man, she is really doing this – “What we all won was the beginning of something really magical. I am so happy I got to play a part.”

Only time will show whether historians of this era in Chinese history will ultimately judge Jessie’s part the more significant, or will plump for Xi Jinping’s recent constitutional amendment revoking the two-term limit on the presidency.

What we know for sure is that Jessie won last Sunday night, singing I Will Always Love You in front of a reported TV audience of one billion. “Jessie J could earn £20m” screams a typical headline, somehow resisting the temptation to predict a great leap forward for her career. The local news outlets have gone with a different line, meanwhile. According to Xinhua, the Chinese news agency: “She said she did not participate in the show for an award but to bring more good works to the audience.” Yes, it is almost as if Jessie … just wants to make the world dance? (You will note that even Chinese state media can’t get the wretched Price Tag out of their brains. Once heard, it is incurable. Your only hope is managing the condition.)

Incidentally, if you have a spare 36 hours – and which of us doesn’t? – I do recommend a visit to Wikipedia to look at the full competition rules of Singer, which make the Glass Bead game look like Snap. So byzantine are the voting procedures that you feel they could only have been conceived in a non-democracy with the specific intention of convincing the audience that suffrage is such an arcane and impenetrable time-suck that they are all much better off without it.

Which reminds me: it was Simon Cowell, the Karaoke Sauron himself, who a few years ago said of X Factor-style shows: “The great thing is where you start seeing it in places like China and Afghanistan. It’s democracy. We’ve kind of given democracy back to the world.” Thank you, Simon.

Quick democracy update: Xi has dispensed with consensus rule and checks on his power; the biggest star of the US reality era sits in the White House with the FBI investigating his phoneline support; and Cowell’s oft-stated belief that British referendums were a great idea is ageing like a fine wine. So, do take a moment to appreciate Simon. The golden age of reality TV did so much for the age that followed it, in ways we are still only beginning to understand.

None of which is to detract from Jessie’s victory, which – as she makes clear – flowed from the decision specifically to target her. “I was the first international artist to ever be asked/compete,” she declares. “An honour alone.”

It is certainly the most audacious Chinese claim to a British property since the 1982 summit where Deng told Margaret Thatcher that China could forcibly requisition Hong Kong if it wanted to. In the end, of course, it didn’t need to. And so with Jessie J.

I suppose these handovers are best done peacefully, and I am sure we Brits handled our end of things in that wistfully dignified, post-imperial way of ours. The studio audience for Jessie’s victory song presumably included a tearful Chris Patten. There would have followed a retiring of the flag, and a Last Post feat Jessie J. All the years in flashback, all the memories crowding in – but she is theirs now. God bless her. God bless China. God bless them all.