MSNBC’s Behind The Wall blog describes the scale of the migration:

It’s as if the entire population of the United States took to the road several times over. During China’s “chunyun” or Spring Festival travel season, the 40-day period that began earlier this month, more than 3.2 billion passenger-trips will tax the country’s transportation system in what is thought to be the world’s largest human migration ever ….

About a quarter billion travelers will load onto China’s over-burdened rail network. Despite a new online ticketing system and hotlines, many have complained of difficulties and delays in buying train tickets. Still, for many Chinese, the ticketing problems and prospect of long ride in crowded condition are small price to pay for the once-in-a-year family reunions.

The accompanying video report describes frustration at a train booking site overwhelmed by over a billion hits per day in early January:

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Online ticket sales have also plucked the increasingly raw nerve of China’s deepening economic inequality. Marketplace’s Rob Schmitz reports from Shanghai, where he attracted an agitated crowd of would-be travellers:

… They’re mad it’s becoming more difficult to buy tickets. This year the government thought it would make buying train tickets easier by making tickets available online. Bad idea.

… Because there are hundreds of millions of people in China, like these guys, who live on less than a few dollars a day. They just don’t have the means or the know-how to hope online and buy tickets. Here’s some tape from one man I spoke to about this, Zhang Weishang …. Zhang’s simply saying it’s not fair. He’s poor and uneducated and he has no access to a computer, much less the internet. As he’s telling me this, a swelling crowd of people watch us and start chiming in-so many people that the police finally are called in.

… [W]hat’s clear is it’s a bigger issue than just train tickets. It’s a reminder that the wealth gap is widening in China. And this train ticket fiasco really hits a chord because train travel has always been within the means of many working migrants in China. Now you’ve got these luxurious bullet trains, online ticketing — it’s becoming a system that favors the rich.

For some, impatient parents are a greater problem than lack of money. The Guardian’s Tania Branigan explains one way for single Chinese to deflect family pressure to get married:

Taking a boyfriend or girlfriend home is a fast way to curb the speculation, which is why Li, like other twentysomethings, has hired a fake partner through an online agency ….

Li will pay him between 500 and 700 yuan (£51-£72) a day – they are still haggling – to accompany her from Beijing to Hunan to meet her parents.

“I don’t need him to stay long, just one night, New Year’s Eve, and he can just say work is busy and he has to go back the next day, like [the guy I hired] last year,” she said.

She is keeping the meeting deliberately short to prevent her parents learning too much about him. Although she has vetted him over a coffee, she does not really know him and worries he might turn out to be a thief and steal from her home.

See a photo and video montage of the long journey home for many in China, by Jordan Pouille and Lei Yang:

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Post tags: CCTV, censorship, chinese new year, e-commerce, income inequality, marriage, migrant workers, New Year's Gala, online, railways, SARFT, Spring Festival, television, trains, transportation
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The manuscript of a book usually needs to be reviewed at least three times by the publishing house. Depending on the subject matter the General Administration of Press and Publications (GAPP), various propaganda departments and other government agencies may also be involved in the approval process. Television and movie productions require the approval of the State Administration for Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) ….

“I stay away from sensitive topics, because I don’t want my work to go to waste, nor do I want to be forced to say what I don’t intend,” said Qiu.

Qiu said he has turned down requests to write about China’s civil war. His father was on the side of the communists, while his in-laws supported the nationalists. “I know quite a bit about both sides, but I can’t write about it in a way I would approve of myself,” he said.

“It’s not possible to comply with the rules and stay true to yourself,” said Shi Kang, whose novel Fendou (Struggle), about the post-1980s generation, was made into a popular TV series. “We are the mouth and throat of the government, have to be,” he said fatefully.

See also Murong Xuecun on the “absurdities” of Chinese censorship, and another Global Times article on censorship of imported materials, via CDT.

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Post tags: censorship, film censorship, history, SARFT, television, writers
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Smart TVs and other set-top internet-to-TV streaming boxes provide a bit of a challenge to China’s government, which prefers to control content carefully, especially the content that appears on televisions, since — unlike computers — nearly everyone in China has one. Internet video companies like PPTV have a license from the government that allows them to provide streaming video services to computers but apparently SARFT does not extend that to net-enabled TV devices, and in fact had expressly forbidden Chinese video companies to support that kind of streaming. PPTV ignored that order, and now they’re being warned that another incident of noncompliance could result in heavy fines, forced restructuring, or even the termination of their license to broadcast video on the internet (which would effectively destroy the company).

See also a possibly surprising—or possibly not—attack on SARFT’s TV content restrictions from Global Times.

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Post tags: Internet video, SARFT, television
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There’s no doubt of the influence TV, video games and online content has on people. But can we really blame a TV show involving desperate single men and women finding dates on the moral decay of our society? Are we to understand that the reason people turn a blind eye to car accident victims is because they have been watching too much China’s Got Talent …?

Have the regulators ever considered the possibility that the reason there are too many similar shows is because creativity has been restricted? Afraid of breaking the rules, producers just follow the bland yet safe and successful route of copying others.

What if Michelangelo was told he couldn’t make nude sculptures, or if Michael Jackson was banned from performing because of his crotch-grabbing antics? China just isn’t a country where outlandish thinking or creativity is encouraged. As for plans to emulate a genius of the late Steve Jobs’ caliber in China? Good luck with that.

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Post tags: Global Times, media controls, Michael Jackson, SARFT, steve jobs, television
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The restricted programmes include talent, dating and game shows, as well as evening performance galas, talk shows and reality shows.

No more than nine such shows will be allowed to be aired on the 34 cable channels between 7.30pm and 10pm each day. Each television network will be limited to two such shows each week and to no more than 90 minutes of such shows between 7.30 and 10 on any given night ….

Each cable television channel must air at least two hours of news-related programming from 6pm to midnight every day, plus two independently-produced news programmes, each at least 30 minutes long, from 6pm to 11.30pm each day. Every channel should broadcast a programme on ideology and morality to promote traditional Chinese culture and “socialist core values”.

The measures are believed to be an attempt to remagnetise the nation’s drifting moral compass, but may simply drive bored younger viewers to seek out foreign programming online. From The Guardian:

Mark Natkin, managing director of Beijing-based Marbridge Consulting, said he had heard of similar edicts being sent to film companies.”People were told by SARFT that they needed to do less entertainment content and improve the balance, with more wholesome content or content conveying messages endorsed by government organs,” said Natkin, who focuses on media and telecoms ….

“[Official concerns] are that left entirely to the market, there are no limits to the levels that programme producers will sink to as they try to attract new audiences and good ratings ….”

Bill Bishop, an independent internet analyst based in Beijing, said video-sharing sites hosting foreign reality shows may receive a boost in traffic, and suggested that authorities might seek to curb this. “If they are neutering traditional television, you have to wonder why they are not going to do something about online [access] – at the moment there’s all the stuff that doesn’t get broadcast,” he said.

China Real Time Report included some prominent netizens’ reactions to SARFT’s new restrictions:

Online reaction on China’s Internet was largely critical, both of the new rules and of an editorial in the People’s Daily official Communist newspaper that supported such a move. “Cultural reform has mutated into the Cultural Revolution,” said Wu Jiaxiang, political commentator and former visiting scholar at Harvard University, on his verified Sina Weibo microblogging account.

“Don’t take this lightly. The Cultural Revolution started with the criticism of ‘Hai Rui Dismissed from Office,’” Zhao Chu, a military expert and newspaper columnist, wrote on his verified Weibo account, referring to a 1959 Peking Opera play about an upright Ming Dynasty official that was criticized by the Gang of Four in 1965 as a veiled lionization of one of Mao Zedong’s political rivals. “If we don’t resist this so-called cultural revolution and cultural construction, it could quickly turn into the most violent and cultureless of movements. Cultural and intellectual tyranny is the foundation of despotic violence.”

See more on SARFT’s rulings and the government’s recent emphasis on cultural development, on CDT.

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Post tags: cultural consumption, ideological vacuum, media controls, moral crisis, moral vacuum, news media, SARFT, television
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The BIFF opening was held outside because the police forced at least two changes of venue, first from a local arts center and then from a hotel. The courtyard of the Li Xianting Film Fund, which is run by an arts critic and independent cinema backer, was lovely, though not an ideal spot for showing the opening film, Embracing Not Sleep, a fictional work about the relationship between two men forced to work in an illegal brick kiln. After Wang Hongwei, an actor who often appears in Jia Zhangke’s films, introduced the directors, the group squeezed into two rooms to watch the opener.

Then the cops arrived. A local official walked into one of the makeshift theaters and demanded, “What are you doing here? What are you watching?” The audience didn’t respond. Outside in the courtyard about a dozen police officers milled around, demanding identification from attendees. I watched as one young security guard who was helping the police walked up to a director and asked for his ID. “I don’t have it with me, and you don’t have the power to ask for it anyway,” the director told the security guard, who walked off with a confused look on his face.

Ramzy notes that none of the festival’s fifty-plus films was submitted for vetting by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), their makers opting to trade ease of distribution for creative freedom. China Media Project recently translated part of an interview in which Han Han blamed this burden for a decline in quality in China’s mainstream film industry:

Southern Metropolis Daily: … You’ve talked before about how you have played with the idea of directing. So why have you not started? These past couple of years, film has been hot, and the money has flowed. On the surface, it seems to be flourishing, with box office numbers breaking hundreds of millions. Do you think there is a higher proportion of good films on the silver screen today?

Han Han: Films aren’t the work of a single person. If a film can’t make it into theaters, there’s no way I can face my investors and partners. The film market is flourishing, but it’s even harder to make decent films in China. The quality of Hong Kong films has been pulled lower as cooperation has been sought [with mainland film partners to reach both markets]. The film censorship system means current material [relating to life today] is avoided altogether ….

Southern Metropolis Daily: Do you think the film censorship system is the chief reason we have so many bad Chinese films?

Han Han: It’s an extremely important reason. When I was writing my book I found myself self-censoring, taking a lot of content out myself. And then the editor would take out more. This is even more the case with film. It may be the case that the government in a country with cultural censorship no longer has to fear criticism or satire at the hands of its own creative works. But then the whole world subjects it to criticism and satire.

The Los Angeles Times reviews a busy year for SARFT on the televisual front, which has seen a crackdown on time travel, transsexuals and assorted “magnifications of distorted ethics and moral values”:

People in the television industry complain that the watchdog’s rulings often come out of the blue, leaving them scratching their heads trying to fathom the reasoning.

“They don’t have any detailed standards for what you can do and what you can’t,” said Miao Di, a professor of television arts at China Communications University in Beijing. “Fundamentally, it’s just, whatever they say goes ….”

The heavy hand of the censor may be backfiring on the Communist Party by making television increasingly irrelevant. A report by Stanford University and Beijing-based consulting firm BDA blamed the government watchdog for pushing viewers onto the Internet, a significantly more difficult medium to control. According to the report, China had 240 million online TV viewers in 2010, an increase of 38 million over the previous year.

See also China TV Struggles to Break Free of State, and Global Times’ take on the anti-time travel guidelines, “Popularity Does Not Always Rhyme With Quality”, via CDT. PBS has posted a non-SARFT-approved guide to Essential Documentaries About China, which may also be of interest.

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Post tags: cinema, film censorship, film festivals, Han Han, media control, SARFT, television
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In 2009, the government allowed provincial TV networks in principle to build their content production and marketing operations into commercial businesses, as long as they separated them from news and broadcasting, which needed to remain under government control ….

Last year, HBS set up Mango TV, a separate company under which it wants to run its new media, content production and marketing operations. “We plan to transfer all assets related to these areas to Mango before the end of this year,” says Ouyang Changlin, HBS director and party secretary.

“News operations and the broadcasting platform will remain at Hunan TV and will not be commercialised. But the two will be linked in so far as our broadcasting platform will get priority access to the content produced under Mango ….”

Last year, HBS entered an agreement under which it took over content production and gained management rights for Qinghai Satellite TV, the broadcaster of a poor north-western province whose ad income is only a fraction of Hunan’s. The news operations and broadcasting platform remained in the Qinghai government’s hands. Shanghai Media Group, another leading regional broadcaster, has entered a similar deal with Shandong Education TV ….

Analysts are also pessimistic about the prospects for actual merger activity. “It is very unlikely that the government would allow consolidation between the broadcasters across provincial borders in the near term, because they would first have to change how they regulate the industry,” says Ms Redl of CMM.

Even if content production is removed from the government’s direct control, it will remain subject to politically-driven broadcasting “guidelines”, which have shown signs of becoming stricter ahead of the 90th anniversary of the Party’s foundation. From the second FT article:

In the latest evidence of tighter political controls, the State Administration for Radio, Film and Television told HBS and other television stations that benchmarks for measuring the success of programmes had to change. It said broadcasters should let “quality, responsibility and values” guide their programming.

In 2005, the regulator told HBS to stop running ”Super Girl”, China’s first televised talent show which was the closest thing the country had to American Idol, and on which the station made its name and fortune.

Some officials saw the programme, which many people would consider innocent, as subversive because it propelled individuals to fame based on audience votes. It demonstrated the power of popular opinion in China – a constant concern for the Communist party in a country where people cannot elect their leaders ….

Mr Ouyang, who also serves as HBS’s Communist party secretary, denied rumours that the regulator had asked the station to follow Chongqing TV, the broadcaster of a western Chinese municipality which has replaced commercials with “red” programming.

“The government may like ‘red’ programmes, but if nobody watches your programme, that’s good for nothing,” he said in defence of his pro-market approach.

SARFT attracted ridicule earlier this year with its guidelines discouraging time travel themes on TV, but the Global Times leapt to its defence.

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Post tags: Hunan, Hunan TV, Qinghai Province, SARFT, television
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Lei Jianjun, associate professor at the School of Journalism and Communication in Tsinghua University, said TV channels rush to produce shows offering little beyond entertainment because their advertisement revenue is directly tied to the number of people who tune in. Such shows, he explained, tend to attract the largest audiences.

In addition, some local TV stations have found that popularity and large profits can result from just a few well-watched entertainment shows. A dating show called If You Are the One, for instance, prompted many people last year to switch to Jiangsu satellite TV, one of the most watched TV channels in China.

That show joined Happy Camp, a 14-year-old weekly variety show on Hunan satellite TV, and the 2010 Spring Festival Gala, broadcast by China Central Television, to become the most watched entertainment programs in 2010, according to the report by CSM Media Research.

If You Are the One was popular enough last year to prompt various other TV channels to air their own dating shows in an attempt at attracting larger audiences and more advertisers.

Despite their success, the matchmaking programs have become the subject of much debate in China.

Some contestants were heavily criticized for what certain viewers perceived to be blatant materialism and money worship. Ma Nuo, a woman contestant on If You Are the One, became a household name last year after she had turned downed a jobless bachelor in the show and explained her refusal by saying she “would rather cry in a BMW (than smile on a bike)”.

See also: a Time article from last year on ‘If You Are the One’ and its imitators.

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Post tags: CCTV, entertainment, matchmaking, television, TV, TV commercials
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Censoring media content that is inappropriate locally is part of government responsibilities everywhere. A classic example is when the US’ FCC imposed a high fine on CBS for airing an incident when Janet Jackson accidentally exposed her breast during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show.

Consequently, a five-second broadcast delay was imposed on live broadcasts to avoid this type of offensive material being shown.

Admittedly, some SARFT guidelines are not supported by the domestic audience. To maintain the viability of TV and movie content, satisfying the audiences’ demands, and keeping an ethical bottom line about what is broadcast, the SARFT has quite the juggling job on its hands ….

What are Western media worried about? Either on the freedom of creation or in finding fault with Chinese’s broadcasting supervisor, exaggerating SARFT’s guidelines over time travel dramas is pointless.

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Post tags: Global Times, SARFT, television, time, travel
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The latest guidance on television programming from the State Administration of Radio Film and Television in China borders on the surreal – or, rather, an attack against the surreal.

New guidelines issued on March 31 discourages plot lines that contain elements of “fantasy, time-travel, random compilations of mythical stories, bizarre plots, absurd techniques, even propagating feudal superstitions, fatalism and reincarnation, ambiguous moral lessons, and a lack of positive thinking.”

“The government says … TV dramas shouldn’t have characters that travel back in time and rewrite history. They say this goes against Chinese heritage,” reports CNN’s Eunice Yoon. “They also say that myth, superstitions and reincarnation are all questionable.”

Chinese censorship at its best?

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Post tags: art censorship, television, TV and radio stations
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