China Cracks Down On ‘Excessive Entertainment’

Singing Contest 'Super Girl' (Photo: Shizhao/Wiki Commons)

Satellite broadcasters in China have cut entertainment TV by two-thirds following a government campaign, state news agency Xinhua has reported.

An order by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) to curb ”excessive entertainment” came into effect on January 1st.

The number of entertainment shows aired during prime time each week has dropped from 126 to 38, said the watchdog.

However, as The World’s Mary Kay Magistad explains, savvy Chinese youth are simply turning away from their televisions, and switch on laptops and pirated western DVDs instead.

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Marco Werman: Too much reality on television has lead authorities in China to crackdown on TV entertainment. Officials want fewer programs like this one, called If You Are the One, China’s answer to The Dating Game. A new policy went into effect on January 1 that restricts the number of such programs Chinese TV stations can air. The effect has been immediate. The 126 prime time entertainment on offer on Chinese TV in December have dwindled to 38 now. The programs that have been axed vary, according to The World’s Mary Kay Magistad in Beijing.

Mary Kay Magistad: Game shows, dating shows, celebrity shows, talent shows where viewers vote, although they’ve already cut back on those, time travel shows, spy dramas and basically anything that the government feels is not implicating appropriate socialist values…anything where people are encouraged to be materialistic or sexual bawdy, or not to think enough about the sacrifices that the party made to give people the welfare and rices that they have now.

Werman: Okay, and before we go on, how does time travel programming fit into that?

Magistad: Well, that’s a really good question and I can only hazard to guess that if you were to say travel back in your time capsule, or car or whatever to say, 1945. And imagine a future where someone other than the Communist Party came to power things could get kind of interesting.

Werman: Mm, gotcha, okay. Now describe for us this show, Super Girl, which apparently has been one of the shows that’s cut. What’s wrong with it specifically?

Magistad: Well, Super Girl, it’s been constrained and that actually happened a while ago. Super Girl was wildly popular with huge swaths of the population. People would go out and campaign on the streets for the Super Girl who they wanted to win.

Werman: And it’s a talent show?

Magistad: It’s a talent show, it’s like American Idol.

Werman: But only for girls?

Magistad: But only for girls.

Werman: Right.

Magistad: Or young women. And then people would really get into voting. And the government looked around at this and was like uh, no, we’re not going to encourage this. And in fact when I went out and talked to people when they banned voting for Super Girl and said we’re just going to have judges in the studio, a number of people I talked to said but this was really great and I hope at some point in the future I’ll actually get a chance for my leaders for the government, which is exactly what the government didn’t want people to be thinking about.

Werman: Now, President Hu said we must clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of westernizing and dividing China. Why is this happening now?

Magistad: President Hu has been thinking a lot about how China can project its culture out into the world. It looks at the soft power that American culture has, the ability to attract, the ability to make others want to emulate you. And he’s thinking I want China to have that. Not just him, but the Communist Party in general. But they don’t know how to go about it. So they spent billions of dollars on Chinese television for external broadcasts. They have their Confucius Institutes around the world where they’re teaching Chinese and having Chinese cultural programs, but it’s still not taking the way they’d like it too. And indeed the television, and films and video games coming into China from the West are attracting Chinese youth. They’re much more interested in seeing a lot of that than they are seeing the sorts of programs that the Chinese government would like them to be focusing on. And what’s interesting here is the government seems to think that by limiting entertainment programming on television it will get China’s youth to sit down in front of the screen and watch what they want them to watch. But these are young people who have computers and have smartphones, and have pirated DVDs, and they can basically do whatever they like, so it’s kind of a losing game.

Werman: So this weekend practically speaking would you be able to go out in Beijing and see any Hollywood movie you wanted?

Magistad: You could go out in Beijing and go to a DVD store which is a legitimate store selling pirated DVDs. It’s very hard to actually find a non-pirated DVD in China. And you can get releases from 2-3 weeks ago that are still showing in American theaters.

Werman: The World’s Asia correspondent Mary Kay Magistad in Beijing talking about new restrictions on entertainment programming in China. Thank you very much.

Magistad: Thank you, Marco.

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