In
Beijing, porn's cool but Hollywood
sucks By Li
YongYan
BEIJING - It's summer time, the
traditional season for Hollywood blockbusters, filled
with gratuitous violence, sex and silliness and drawing
hordes of vacationing students seeking mindless escapes.
But not in Beijing. And it's not just some movies that
are off-limits to ordinary Chinese (but not foreigners
or Chinese with rank and money) - it's information.
The government has just ordered a summer recess
for the showing of Hollywood movies in cinemas. Until
summer is over, vacationing students can spend their
time on other activities that are more uplifting,
ennobling and socialist in nature, and form. As if that
measure is not protective enough, the government says at
least one third of the import quota - 20 foreign movies
a year under China's new World Trade Organization (WTO)
obligations - are to be allocated to studios in other
countries - not America.
The Internet is
supposed to be borderless and limitless in the exchange
of information and ideas. But using sophisticated fire
walls from capitalist Cisco and other vendors, China
blocks all those overseas Chinese websites that are
deemed un-communist, too democratic and critical. The
"access denied" message will display whenever a surfer
types such key words as June 4, Fa Lun Gong. Key in
"democracy" and "freedom" on a Chinese search engine and
the results will flash a headline, "Bush is raping Iraqi
public opinion by pushing for so-called 'Democracy and
Freedom'." In the meantime, pornography seems acceptable
- explicit adult content takes a nanosecond to download
into your computer monitor.
Then there is
television, the most important and popular form of
media. A new government order bans even police drama
from prime time slots in an effort to "purify" the
screen of violence and crime. Foreign programs are off
limits, too, to the average Chinese on the street.
Private installations of satellite dishes are subject to
confiscation. But in hotels and posh residential
buildings, CNN, Skynews, MTV and HBO are playing 24
hours a day.
This partial ban, or put another
way, partial exception, begs the question: If Britney
Spears and live coverage of United Nations debates on
pressing international issues are harmful to the Chinese
people, why then doesn't the government protect
foreigner visitors from the pernicious exposure? More
baffling is the fact that as more and more Chinese are
staying and living at the hotels and expensive
residences equipped with satellite receivers, why
doesn't the government do anything to save these
citizens from spiritual contamination? "Spiritual
contamination" for years has been a rallying cry against
the decadent West. Are those nationals too corrupted to
be worth saving, or is a fat wallet an effective
immunization against capitalist cultural invasion?
Senior officials get access to foreign
programs The fact that officials at and above a
certain level have government-funded access to foreign
and Hong Kong programs begs yet another question: If
ESPN is part of official fringe benefits, Beijing has no
reason to deny it to all fellow Chinese. Communist party
members are sworn to let the "people" enjoy everything
first. If BBC is cultural invasion, then, too, the
government is duty-bound to repel the aggression first
from the homes of its own employees.
To answer
the question, it is imperative to understand that to the
Chinese government, entertainment is not entertainment
alone. It is an education to the people on nationalist
patriotism. Moreover, media is not just a vehicle for
information, but a battleground that is to be occupied,
either by "us", or by "them". Proceeding from this
angle, you will know why it is a major achievement for
the propaganda department to have succeeded in
down-linking China's official TV programs into the US,
Australia, Japan and some European countries. The
strange thing is that having absorbed so much
"education", the Western viewers have yet to rise up in
arms to overthrow their governments in exchange for a
socialist one.
Thus a paradoxical and confusing
picture appears on the Chinese TV screen: foreign
programs are banned from official channels but are
available to foreigners visiting and working in China.
Chinese viewers are not given the choices other than the
official mouthpieces. But some other Chinese, by virtue
of their money, are watching Sex and the City on
HBO from their living room chairs. Typical of a
totalitarian state, propaganda officials decide what you
see. And then, what you see depends on how much money
you have, which is more capitalist than the capitalists.
The worst of the two political systems co-exists
in harmony - only in China. A case in point: former
president of China, Jiang Zemin, loved the smash-hit
movie Titanic so much that he recommended the
movie to all of his fellow Politburo members. "There is
this movie called Titanic. It cost US$250 million
to make, and has cleared $1 billion in revenues by now.
Call it venture investment." He was quoted further by
the People's Daily: "The movie gives a vivid and
thorough portrait of the relationships between the
wealthy and the poor, between money and love and human
reactions in a crisis. Before the new China was
established, I saw many Hollywood films in Shanghai.
Good ones include Gone with the Wind and
Waterloo Bridge.
"I am not raving about
capitalist products, but we should learn more about them
as well about ourselves, so that we can always triumph.
Don't fool ourselves that we are the only ones who know
how to work on people's brains," said Jiang, making the
remarks on March 9, 1998, in Beijing, one month before
the movie premiered in China. It is not clear if Jiang,
now head of the party's powerful Central Military
Commission, will offer Titanic director James
Cameron a job in Beijing's propaganda office, but it is
obvious that Jiang's meat before 1949 somehow became
poison to the Chinese people ever since. They are just
too ignorant to know what is educational, informative
and entertaining to them. So they need a wise leader to
decide that for them.
Even though socialism
has succumbed to commercialism in most aspects of life
in China, government control over information
remains absolute. Some soap operas and movies may be
allowed, but independent sources of news and opinions are
still blocked at the borders or intercepted in the air.
In this sense, culture is war. Those who fail to
recognize this but rather view China as the next big media
market will be disappointed. Some multinationals like News
Corp take great care not to offend Beijing in their
programs, hoping that someday their content will be given
access into China. Dream on. When Beijing says it is a war,
for once they mean it. And it is a war they can't afford
to lose. To "triumph" in the war, no method is
more effective than to deny the other players the entry
onto the battleground. Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News
Corp, may like to know that Sun Tze said over 2,000
years ago, "A war is won or lost before it is fought".
Li YongYan is an analyst of Chinese
finance, political and social trends.
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