Foreign cartoons face prime-time ban

From The Standard:

Tom and Jerry, beware!

China could ban foreign-made cartoons from prime time television once the quantity and quality of domestic cartoons reach a certain level, officials at the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) said Wednesday.

The country already limits the ratio of foreign-made cartoons to domestic ones to 4:6, said an official at the agency’s cartoon department, who refused to give her name.

“We really need to encourage domestic-made cartoons,” said Fu Tiezhen, head of the China Cartoon Arts Committee, an industry group.

“From the mid-80s, a lot of cartoons from America and Japan were imported into China for free or at very little cost. It’s a kind of dumping,” Fu said.