CHINA STEPPED up its tight grip on the internet this week when the powerful State Administration of Radio, Film and TV (Sarft) ordered anyone wishing to run TV shows or other content on the internet to apply for a licence before broadcasting online.
The new rules are a blow to foreign producers trying to break into the potentially lucrative, but heavily regulated, Chinese market because it effectively means only state-approved TV stations and cinemas will be able to import content for webcasting.
The rules come soon after a ban on the online TV site YouTube, which cannot be accessed in China because of footage broadcast showing the beating of protesters by Chinese police during last year’s riots in Tibet.
Despite the watching net nannies who patrol the Great Firewall of China, the web has been abuzz with discontented chatter over official remarks last week relating to the YouTube ban.
“The internet in China is fully open and the Chinese government manages the internet according to the law. As for what you can and cannot watch, watch what you can watch, and don’t watch what you cannot watch,” foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang told a news conference.
Blogger comments were very much in the Orwellian spirit of the official remarks.
“Qin Gang is telling the truth. What we can see is possibly not what we like; and as to what we cannot see, it seems that until now I haven’t been able to find it,” wrote one webizen.
Another wrote: “We will see what the emperor wants us to see; if the emperor said the earth was square, and someone dared to say it was round, I would beat him to death on behalf of 1.3 billion people.”
The authorities have already tightened controls on the media in this, the 60th anniversary of the revolution that brought the Communist Party to power and the 20th anniversary of the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy demonstrations on Tiananmen Square.
The new rules, which govern “audiovisual content broadcast online and via mobile internet”, ban any programmes seen as anti-constitutional or endangering national security, a euphemism for dissent.
The rules forbid TV shows that incite ethnic hatred – probably a reference to Tibet, which China sees as an inextricable part of its sovereign territory.
They also ban content that publicises cults or superstitions, a reference to the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, and forbid programmes that “explicitly display sexual perversions (including extramarital affairs and wife swaps), extreme violence or the slaughtering of animals”.
The government began an anti-smut campaign this year, and since then Sarft has closed 341 audio-video websites for containing low-brow content, according to state-run news service Xinhua.
“If they put everyone in prison, there would be less people to buy houses, then house prices would stabilise, then angry people would disappear. So the government should build more prisons to stimulate the economy,” wrote one blogger.