Excessive Entertainment

There was a great article in the Times about recent crackdowns in China on there own version of blogging. As many of you know Blogspot, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and pretty much any other social media tool from the US is already banned in China, but the Chinese have there own versions of many of them, often just thinly veiled copies of the American version. The communists have been less afraid of this since being based in China they can sensor them to their hearts content. By some estimates besides the most advanced filtering and blocking software around the Chinese employ tens of thousands of people to just go around taking down content that the government might not like or posting comments favorable to the government.

They also get many of the Chinese social media sights to heavily self police by holding the implicit threat that if too much undesirable content gets posted the whole thing will be shut down. This though has not stopped the internet from still being the freest place in China. Even with the governments restrictions the internet remains anonymous enough that people still posts things critical, or at least indirectly critical, of the government. Much of it gets taken down but the ideas still spread. This has lead the government in recent months to go on a much more through jihad against any form of free expression in media. The oddest part of this by far is the censoring of TV shows with no overt or implicit political content. To quote the NYT article

"The most striking instance occurred Tuesday, when the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television ordered 34 major satellite television stations to limit themselves to no more than two 90-minute entertainment shows each per week, and collectively 10 nationwide. They are also being ordered to broadcast two hours of state-approved news every evening and to disregard audience ratings in their programming decisions."

This comes as by far the most popular thing on TV is bizarre variety shows where people compete in singing dancing and the occasional terrible magic trick. For the government of China though this represents a deep and pervasive threat to there way of life. For all the talk about modernization there is still a strong sentiment in the government here that harkens back to the Cultural Revolutions vision of an all communist party media all the time. Instead of seeming like a terrifying group of thugs some days the communists just come across as the parents from Footloose, the original not the remake. The best part of the article though was that these crazy new regulations were aimed at getting rid of "excessive entertainment and vulgar tendencies." I have watched a fair bit of Chinese TV and I can tell you that they have yet to come up with a TV show in China that is "excessively" entertaining.

The sad part about this article was how many of the people commenting from the US were wholly in support of censoring TV. I guess people really are fed up with all that reality crap. You can find the article at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/27/world/asia/china-imposes-new-limits-on-entertainment-and-bloggers.html?_r=1&hp