Oriada

China is getting creative, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization, which revealed today that patent applications from the Middle Kingdom doubled between 2000 and 2004.  But those who fear change needn’t worry.  The Chongqing Municipal Government has taken steps to ensure that all this creativity business doesn’t get out of hand.

Authorities in the megalopolis announced yesterday that hefty fines would be slapped on those involved in online misbehaviour or net-hijinx of any sort.  Officially the new rules are aimed at those "who spread information or remarks defaming others, launch personal attacks or damage others’ reputations online".  Chongqing’s netizens are also reminded to eat their greens and not to run with scissors in their hands.  But the declaration also takes a pointed swipe at Egao, the peculiarly Chinese phenomenon of satiric online videos.  Chongqing authorities promise fines of up to 5000 yuan for those who produce online videos that "satirize others or social phenomena".

How they plan to enforce this is anyone’s guess. But then all things internet, and egao in particular, do tend to attract some of the wackier rulings.  (Like the time authorities tried - but failed - to regulate how much time people spent playing online games. Or the more recent declaration that all online videos had to be registered before being posted.)

==YOUR 30 SECOND EGAO CRASH COURSE==

What is this Egao you speak of?

A phenomenon centred around spoof videos and photoshopped images that has blossomed on the internet in China over the last year or so.  China Daily describes it as "a popular subculture that deconstructs serious themes to entertain people with comedy effects". And if this description is good enough for China Daily, it’s good enough for me.

Sounds like my kind of scene. I want in! Where can I buy?

Steady on there. It’s not available in the shops. At least not until some local ‘entrepeneur’ realises there’s money to be made in it and employs a team of migrant workers from Henan to pump out Egao ripoffs day and night. For the real deal, though, you need to get to one of China’s many video sharing websites, like Tudou.com, Uume.com or Yoqoo.com.   Among the most popular videos on any of these sites, you’re bound to find a few egao classics, along with clips of cavorting bikini babes and limitless quantities of "cutesy" flash animations based around Chinese popsongs.  Many of the most popular vids have also migrated to Youtube.   

Why are the authorities getting so hot and bothered about it?  Internet videos are wholesome, harmless fun, aren’t they?  Well, I mean apart from all that porn and snuff movies and whatnot.

Well no, it’s not all harmless fun, as far as the Chinese authorities are concerned. Or at least not when it involves them directly.  Poking fun at the leaders, or at any of the pantheon of revolutionary icons - like boy-warrior Pan Dongzi (see below) or whiter-than-white orphan Lei Feng - is strictly verboten.  A cartoonist for Guangzhou’s XKB newspaper was suspended last month for drawing this not-exactly-biting caricature of Chinese president Hu Jintao.  

 

The cartoon shows Hu crying while writing a letter.  And it was used to illustrate a true story about Hu writing a letter…and crying while doing so.  We are not talking Swiftean levels of satire here.

So successful have the authorities been in stifling satire that Chinese writer Yan Lianke this week revealed that he self-censors his writing so that it won’t get banned by the official censors.  He also admitted "My greatest worry is that self-censorship has drained my passion and dulled my sharpness."

So, it must be something of a shock for the authorities to watch the ever-growing popularity of this less-than-reverential artform.  And, just like everyone’s favourite pouting fat kid, Egao idol Xiapang,  the fact that the authorities are so very humourless makes them ripe targets for spoofing. 

Everyone else is talking about Egao.  How can I join in without sounding like an ass ?

Rock on up to your nearest egao-related conversation, subtly namedrop at least 2 of these 3 Egao icons and you’re golden….

The Backdorm Boys:  Two students (plus occassional accomplices) from Guangdong province, who, instead of memorising words for the CET4, spend their free time directing and starring in amusing parodies of pop videos on a computer in their dorm. 

Hollywood Movie Equivalent: Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.  The Backdorm Boys’ brand of rubber-faced hilarity is not exactly original, but what they do, they do very well indeed.

Sparkling Red Star: The lampoonee here is a teenager named Pan Dongzi, the lead character in 70s propoganda "patriotic education" classic - Sparkling Red Star.  In the original, little Dongzi is so disgusted by the feudalistic behaviour of his landlord that he joins up with the Red Army, becomes a revolutionary and eventually exacts his bitter revenge on the bourgeoisie.  But in the 2006 version, instead of being a vicious, capitalist-baiting child-soldier, he is fulfilling his lifelong dream to win the Supergirls singing contest and get rich.  Not surprisingly, this video sparked an outcry that led to its director issuing a fulsome (in the original sense of the word) apology: “I didn’t expect an imprudent activity would cause such a serious result. I call for all netizens and Web sites not to spread or download the video any more, otherwise all the aftereffects have nothing to do with me.”

Hollywood Movie Equivalent: Last Tango in Paris.  Cleancut hero from decades yore returns….but this time he’s doing something dirty and corrupt…

The Bloody Incident of the Steamed Bun:  This 20 minute parody of the movie The Promise was Egao’s breakout hit, the one that brought the idea to the mainstream.  It became popular partly due to the wave of intensely negative reaction that greeted Chen Kaige’s overblown "epic", the most expensive (and most incomprehensible) Chinese film ever made.  Viewers distinctly unimpressed with the original 3 hour behemoth found this internet snippet a far more rewarding experience.

Hollywood Movie Equivalent: Citizen Kane.  No serious discussion about Egao is complete without namechecking this ‘classic’.  Plus, just as Hearst went after Orson Welles, the director of The Promise, pompous oaf Chen Kaige, attempted to sue the maker of the spoof for using clips from his pompous film without permission.  Apparently realising that this was making him look far more ridiculous than any 20 minute internet clip ever could, he eventually dropped the case.

Just over a month after Peking University kicked off an almighty ruckus by announcing that it would build a golf course/driving range on campus (as noted on this blog at the time), Xiamen University yesterday declared that it would go one better and force students from its business majors to learn how to play golf, whether they want to or not. 

The head of the University, Zhu Chongshi, announced yesterday that all students majoring in Management, Law, Economics and (for some bizarre reason) Software Engineering will be required to take to the fareways as part of their studies. "The highest embodiment of the education system is producing socially elite people with the best education," claims Mr. Zhu.

Inevitably, the move has been met with howls of derision from some quarters.  China Daily quotes the Chairman of CIE International Education Group denouncing the move as "vulgar".  

Golf has long been derided in China as the "rich man’s game".  But with two top universities announcing golf courses within a month of one another, you get the sense that "the rich man’s game" is about to reach its tipping point in China and go mainstream.  This in itself is hardly surprising.  Another China Daily report notes that over the past 4 days in Shanghai, 12,000 visitors to a luxury products show lavished half a billion yuan on "luxury" trinkets like Porches and diamonds. suggesting that there is a big market out there for a sport that is still very expensive to play here.

However, all this interest in golf means that tee times are going to get very crowded over the next few years.   With arable land at a premium, the government has already slapped very strict limits on the construction of new land- and water-gobbling golf courses, and crackdowns have left other existing courses in legal limbo. So be prepared for sky-high green fees….and watch out for those software engineers.

As of some time this afternoon, Wikipedia has been completely acessible in Beijing, the first time it’s been available in China in almost exactly  a year.  Commentors on the chinese-forums website have reported that they can access it. It is too early to tell whether this is a permanent arrangement or just a temporary leak in the firewall. 

It has, however, already been several hours since it came back online, and a quick scan finds that a number of  pages on some of the more sensitive issues are available. Intriguingly though, trying to access certain pages (e.g. those on events in 89) results in acccess to the entire site being denied.  This is similar to the block that occurs when users search for sensitive keywords on google.  Google immediately becomes off limits for that user.  Could it be that authorities have spent the last year sifting through and cataloguing the millions of entries on Wikipedia and have finally decided to allow access to the non-sensitive ones?