Kicking off our China week on the site after a two week trip to Shanghai (and weekend in Hong Kong) begins with a twist on our usual media Mondays. Later on today I’ll be talking about Chinese “cinema,” but first let’s talk about one of the last things anyone would notice before they visited China but something you can’t help but notice once you’re there: television.
I can’t say I’d honestly thought much about what it would be like to watch TV in China (to me bigger questions would loom like sky-high pollution, crowds, and tough restrictions on freedoms we take for granted in the U.S.) but it fully plays into the bigger problem of government censorship of nearly all aspects of Chinese life.
There’s a ton of hype about the Facebook IPO right now (I myself may regret buying a dozen shares), but how much did they talk about it on Chinese television? Not much (I guess it would be cruel to advertise something that isn’t allowed in China). While I was there it was smack dab in the middle of the controversy about the blind Chinese dissident who wanted to come to America and the tensions this caused with the U.S. government, but how much was it talked about there? Crickets.
Actually, that’s not fair, it was discussed pretty at length by the few English speaking news channels my Shanghai hotel carried (my guess is that none of these channels are carried in the rural areas westerners aren’t likely to visit), it’s just too bad that we didn’t get to see any of it. That’s right, whenever the news would turn to covering the blind Chinese dissident, the screen would go black. Specifically, once it started talking about how Chinese dissidents are beaten and tortured, the screen went black and stayed black until they quit talking about it.
Anything that would make China look good (booming economy, how well they handled the 2008 Olympics, how they’re allowing the blind Chinese dissident to come to America, happy ending!…after they don’t have a choice, etc.) is repeated throughout the day. Anything that would make them look bad is given the media equivalent of a red cell: a black out. They just conspicuously cut the channel to a black screen (while all the other channels still work) and don’t put it back up until the news has moved on to lighter fare.
But that’s not the only thing that gets censored. American television shows and movies that have ANY type of sex or homoerotic content get edited within an inch of their life. The part in Starsky and Hutch where Will Ferrell’s gay convict convinces Ben Stiller to ride Owen Wilson in a completely PG way? Gone. Any part in Glee where two dudes kiss? Gone, making each episode about three minutes long. I watched an episode of Game of Thrones (the HBO show that practices “Sexposition” meaning characters explain things while naked or on top of each other) and didn’t know what the hell was going on.
So it’s not much fun watching a nudity free HBO, or a censored Starz channel, or a BBC forced to walk a tightrope but what about the Chinese channels? I watched them on occasion too, and although I don’t speak Mandarin and didn’t fully grasp the dialogue I still don’t think it would have made things much less strange. Their “entertainment” channels have production values that are only slightly above internet porn, their news channels feature reporters that look like there’s a trained sniper on them just off camera, and their children’s channel is one of the strangest fucking things I’ve ever seen. It looked about like Lady Gaga got her hands on PBS and let coked up felons in monster costumes run free with the type of over-excited children I only see in cereal commercials.
P.S.—-I also have to admit that although the foreign news was edited when it came to anything China, I enjoy CNN international a little bit more than domestic CNN. What’s the difference? Well they only talk about the presidential election 12 hours a day instead of 20 and do some great, 60 Minutes style reporting on world issues that Americans (supposedly) don’t care enough about to ever feature on our domestic news. Also, I enjoyed CNN international more than the BBC, which can take a marginally interesting European story (the election of a new French president) and really run it into the ground.
Great article