This article was updated with information about new online rules.
This article was updated with information about new online rules.
In the past decade, Chinese society has embraced homosexuality more openly than many neighboring nations in Asia. But a new set of rules from a subdivision of SARFT, one of the main media censorship bodies, go in the other direction. If upheld, Chinese producers can no longer make television shows depicting ”abnormal sexual relations or sexual behavior” including “homosexuality” or “perversion.”
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That’s not all. The new rules also ban shows that depict smoking, drinking, adultery, sexual freedom or reincarnation, among many other activities.
China’s “General Rules for Television Series Content Production” were first reported by Chinese media on Mar. 2, after being made public by the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) at an annual meeting of China’s television producers on Feb. 27. Li Jingsheng, head of SARFT’s TV series unit, told the meeting that online dramas will have the same restrictions, and staff censors will supervise online content around the clock.
The rules are an update of ones issued in 2010 (link in Chinese) by SARFT, but with far more detail, and mark the first time that Beijing has issued specific bans on many themes.
The rules have been drafted in order to ”thoroughly implement General Secretary Xi Jinping’s speech at the national forum on literature,” to promote China’s TV industry, and to help TV series producers to avoid risks during production, the introduction says. In 2014, Xi made a landmark speech encouraging socialist artwork, where he stressed the art must serve a social purpose.
Television production companies should “earnestly follow the regulations in the general rules, actively produce the content promoted by the general rules, and must not produce any content that is banned by the general rules.”
Article five of the rule spells out which “specific content must not appear in television series,” and includes a lengthy list of banned content:
Nearly everything in the new rules was not included in the original 2010 rules issued directly from SARFT, except for the ban on content that harms China’s national image, unity and social stability, or is pornographic or induces crimes. SARFT has published similar guidances before for online video, but not for broadcast television. And none of them specifically singled out homosexuality.
The rules are part of a concerted crackdown on what China’s state media can show, and formalize attempt to scrub depictions of homosexuality from entertainment around the country. Just last week, a gay-themed web series called “Addiction” was abruptly scrubbed from China’s video streaming sites. In January, a viral internet hit about bisexuality was taken offline. And in September 2015, a documentary about young gay Chinese called Mama Rainbow mysteriously disappeared from the web.
While they were publicized by SARFT, they were issued by the China Television Drama Production Industry Association, a 400 member group that produces 90% of China’s television content, and the China Alliance of Radio, Film and Television, a self-described civil society group. If enforced as written the rules would force many of China’s most popular shows off the air.
Extra-marital, reincarnation, and criminal activities are popular Chinese TV dramas, as they are everywhere. Some Chinese television viewers joked on Weibo (link in Chinese) the new rules would even ban the adaptation of China’s “Four Great Classical Novels,” considered to be the best novels in Chinese literature, which already appeared on television in the 1980s. In The Water Margin, for example, the hero brutally kills his brother’s wife and her lover, for revenge.
If the new rules are enforced, Chinese television viewers may be left with nothing interesting to watch.
