http://news.sawf.org/Entertainment/10170.aspx

Rather than the state telling people specifically, that they can do this and can't do that, Beijing is trying to introduce an element of doubt as to whether something is OK to produce so as to get people to censor themselves.

By naming these genres, Beijing is saying "We will be watching you more closely if you pick the wrong ones".

If China were to produce a definiative list of banned topics, it would allow people to work the system because they know what the can get away with, or to push things right up to the margines of those laws.

As it is, Beijing is suggesting that it might take a closer look at certain things, this means that film makers will automatically try to avoid those things. Often, this is as as good as a ban.

Equally, these guiding prinicples mean that directors etc will approach these areas in a way that is favorable to the state line far more often because they know that approaching them in a favorable way is safe.

For example. If the state were to announce that it will be taking a closer look at the way that the PLA is represented on television, you will get a flood of worried directors bumping anything and everything that critisizes the army or shows conflict within its ranks, and a rush of other directors running around finding scripts that paraise the army and show it in a good light.

Give it a few years and they will probably ban poor people in soaps too, and China will end up like Korea or America, where all soap characters are rich big city pretty people who live in houses with pools and two cars, who are traumatized when they break a nail.

Also, what's the reason for focusing attention on the list of categories at the end of the document? At least to me it implied that these types of TV series were being treated specially by the censors, when in fact all it's saying is these are the standard genre names to be used when filling out forms.

Anyway, I had assumed that everyone here would know that all TV series in the PRC have ALWAYS been subject to state approval and censorship and I had expected a thread on this to indicate some sort of new development.

However, I find your original post and subsequent discussion highly misleading. The document you posted included a list of categories of TV series and you refer to categories of TV series being banned. If someone is not fluent in Chinese or didn't read the document carefully, then that person may be led to believe that the document is evidence of some major new development in censorship and all those categories are banned when in fact the document is simply telling producers that these category/genre names are the standard ones you should use when filling out forms.

So just to clarify for people who can't read Chinese, there is NO categorical ban on martial arts series, or historical costume dramas, or any other genre.

where does the document say anything is banned? It seems to me that this document is mainly bunch of empty bureaucratic language with the only practical part being instructions on how to fill out reporting forms.

Congratualtions, you've just hit upon the secret of Chinese censorship.

Beijing deliberately leaves out the details so that should somebody do something that the government doesn't like, then they can simply apply the rule that is the best fit to the situation. Regardless if whether or not what the person did was actually wrong.

Equally, because people have no clear guidlines about what is and isn't allowed they will be overly cautious. Even if somethng is OK, people aren't willing to take the risk.

In short, this document is so vague that it could be used to ban anything in the given areas, which makes people afraid to do anything that might get them banned, so they instead stick to 'safe topics'.

An example of this way of thinking is that if a journalist wants to know if an article that he is writting is covered by the list of banned topics, he can't actually look at the list of banned topics first.

Instead, he must write the article and take the finished piece to an editor who has permission to see the list to see if it is OK to publish it.

If it is not on the list, he's OK, if it is, his job is at risk.

In this situation, would you write an article suspect topic and risk your job. Or would you write something boring about shoes instead?

Equally, one of things that no newspaper in China is allowed to publish, is the contents of the list of things that no newspaper in China is allowed to publish.

The whole reason why there are so many historical costume dramas on Chinese TV is that there were considered to be safe. It was OK to have political intrague if it was pre comunist, now apparently it isn't.

And for that we have to thank Towards the Republic. God, it's been decades after the Ming Mandarin incident, but we really haven't progressed that much.

A correction, though: we don't have "soaps" in China. We have telenovelas. :wink:

The whole reason why there are so many historical costume dramas on Chinese TV is that there were considered to be safe. It was OK to have political intrague if it was pre comunist, now apparently it isn't.

Give it a few years and they will probably ban poor people in soaps too, and China will end up like Korea or America, where all soap characters are rich big city pretty people who live in houses with pools and two cars, who are traumatized when they break a nail.

Pass the barf bag please. The state is trying to kill the one creative outlet available to Chinese TV stations.