How Li Xuejian, Deaf and Voiceless, Performed the Long March Gala's Wordless Role
In the CCTV gala closing China's Long March 90th-anniversary commemorations, actor Li Xuejian — deaf since cancer treatment and unable to speak — played an old Red Army soldier in a wordless segment, with AI reconstructing his voice for the narration.
The most-watched segment of the week's most state-serious television event contained no words at all. On Thursday evening, CCTV aired "Song of the Long March" (《长征颂歌》), the televised gala closing out the commemorations of the 90th anniversary of the Long March's end — an anniversary the country has been marking for weeks in prime time, in stamps and in classrooms. In one segment, "Dawn Ahead" (《曙光在前》), the actor Li Xuejian appeared as an old Red Army soldier.
The performance is wordless by design: a weathered face registering a dead end, then a turning point, then the moment the old soldier hands his horse lantern to a young recruit and lifts it toward the light. When the house lamps came up, the studio audience broke into applause — for the revolution's escape from its own dead ends, and for the man on the stage (Jimo News reported).
What many viewers did not know is how literal the silence was. Li Xuejian, 72, one of China's most respected actors, has been completely deaf since his treatment for nasopharyngeal cancer — his wife confirmed it to People's Daily in August — and he can no longer speak. The gala's director, Yu Lei, said in an interview that no one could interpret this "silent performance" better than Li, and that she directs him by typing on her phone; broadcast footage shows her doing exactly that.
The narration over the segment sounds like Li Xuejian because it is — mostly. The production team gathered his "dry voice" recordings from across his classic roles, had a professional dubbing artist study his cadence and feeling, and used AI to generate the segment's narration in a reconstructed version of his voice. Viewers who learned this afterward did not recoil. "The first time I've felt AI voice imitation was actually useful," one wrote, "and my nose started stinging again" — Chinese internet shorthand for fighting back tears.
The performance landed because its theme was already the performer's biography: endurance, loss, and the decision to carry on. And it offered a country that spends much of its AI debate worrying about deepfakes and displaced workers a use of the technology that, for one evening, made people cry for the right reasons.