SARFT clearly had their Weetabix last week. Not content with banning fun imposing strict new broadcasting regulations on foreign cartoons on Monday, on Wednesday they announced new rules requiring all videos broadcast on the internet to get prior approval from the government. The ruling seems to spell the end in China for peer-sharing video sites like Youtube and Toodou.
After initial incredulity, some possible explanations for this bizarre behaviour have begun to emerge.
1. A turf war. Initial speculation centred on the theory that SARFT was making something akin to a land-grab, staking its claim as the legal arbiter of media on internet in China. This, it seems, is something of a grey area in government policy, as several different departments have responsibilities for various aspects of internet policing, so it is not clear who actually oversees online media output.
2. Pressure from state-owned traditional media. Younger generations are deserting in droves the (state-owned) traditional media - tv, radio and newspapers - in favour of diverse and very-much not-state-owned entertainment options on the net. That, in itself, is not surprising, since the political interference, tiny budgets and lousy production values prevalent in most media outlets mean that most of their output is pretty poor. But with ad revenues falling, the media moguls are starting to fret. In yet another recent ruling (these guys really don’t mess around) SARFT did away with infomercials for fake health products, which had been a big moneyspinner for provinvicial TV stations. So the thinking goes, that SARFT reckons by clamping down on other entertainment sources it can convince people to go back to watching TV. (We never said these were going to be good reasons) This would be in line with another SARFT ruling earlier this year which insisted that websites like Sina.com carry only government-approved news rather than generating their own stories, thus ensuring that state-owned newspapers wouldn’t lose readers to net outlets with fresher content.
3. Displeasure from high levels at the mockery of ‘national heroes’. One particular type of online video content has been getting under the skin of the authorities for some time, the peculiar style of satirical spoofs known in Chinese as E gao. Party posterboy Lei Feng and hero of 1970s military propaganda flick Sparkling Red Star, Pan Dongzi, are just two of the political icons to have been pilloried in online video parodies in recent months. But in general in Chinese culture the pantheon of Communist heroes, from dear leaders to war heroes and even, until recently, Lei Feng, are revered with po-faced seriousness at all times. They have been long considered beyond criticism; to poke fun at them is akin to insulting the motherland itself.
So it must be something of a shock for the authorities to see Pan Dongzi not fighting against the Japanese, as he does in Sparkling Red Star, but rather following his dream to win the Supergirls reality TV show, as he does in the wildly popular online spoof
With the booming popularity of these kinds of spoof videos (among China’s post-89 generation X in particular), it’s understandable that officials fear that this kind of iconaclism could reach a tipping point, at which stage any and all of the once-sacred cows might be up for mockery. If such a stage were reached, a criticism free-for-all could conceivably break out and spread far beyond the relatively isolated realm of internet spoofs.
Official annoyance at the blossoming Egao culture was registered several weeks ago at a pompous "conference of experts" in Beijing, which issued a "Down-with-this-sort-of-thing" declaration and called for more "solemn" and "earnest" net videos instead. So this ruling may be an attempt by the authorities to nip this troublesome artform in the bud.
Regardless of the reasons for the new law, it remains to be seen whether it will actually have any effect. Danwei has a translation of a newspaper article questioning its legality and effectiveness.
