The General Administration of Press and Publication, or GAPP, and State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, or SARFT, are China's two principal ministries of propaganda, tasked with tweaking, managing, and bowlderizing creative, edgy, realistic, and otherwise inspiring work into a mushy, digestible pap for mainstream consumption. It's an unpleasant job, but someone has to do it. ...

China ostensibly hates porn -- hates it with a passion and hates it despite reason -- but its state news organization links to it and -- as the running joke with us goes -- one particular porn site, the 39th most popular in the US, remains unblocked. To clarify: that's 39th most popular website, not just porn site, and 65th most popular website in the world. PornHub. ...

What do former Taiwan premier Frank Hsieh Chang-Ting, former Google president Kai-Fu Lee, and human rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang have in common? Within the last three weeks, each of them has seen his Sina Weibo account suspended. In Lee's case, he was slapped with a three-day ban. In Hsieh's case, his account was completely trashed. And Pu? He can't do anything on any Chinese microblog -- not Sina's, Tencent's ...

Ah, live TV. Did magician Lu Chen give the CCTV Spring Festival Gala -- the most-watched show on Chinese television every year -- its Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction" moment? First, a little background. Top Chinese pianist Li Yundi and Chinese American singer Leehom Wang are best buds who spend so much time together that people openly question the nature of their relationship. (The two have repeatedly s ...

State Administration of Work Safety Vice Director Wang Dexue, possibly seeking a promotion, appeared to cry while inspecting a bridge collapse in Henan earlier this week, and let's just say no one bought it. Netizens took to calling him "New Watch Brother," a term that has since been censored on Sina Weibo. All this leads us to China Digital Times's recent dispatch from the Ministry of Truth, i.e. the Centr ...

Nearly everyone hates the Great Firewall (GFW), which blocks websites such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and many others from being viewed inside mainland China. To "jump over" said firewall, a small cottage industry of VPN services have sprung up, such as Witopia, Astrill and 12vpn, to name a few, to help the frustrated Internet user get their "real" Internet fix. While most users of VPN technology are bel ...

The social coding website GitHub, which fell on the wrong side of the Great Firewall on Monday, has apparently been restored on the mainland, though as you can see from the above via GreatFire.org, tests have yielded contradictory results. According to Global Times: Lee Kai-fu, a prominent Internet figure and former vice president of Google, spearheaded the protest by saying on his Weibo that he "strongly o ...

The Golden Shield Project (aka Great Firewall of China) has decided GitHub no longer conforms with Chinese notions of harmony, as first noticed Monday by GreatFire.org and reported on The Next Web. The block comes on the heels of the Ministry of Railways's unsuccessful attempt to convince Chinese browser-makers to stop providing a plugin that helps users purchase train tickets off MOR's website. ...

Two amazing facts come out of John Kennedy's post this morning on SCMP, and I'm not sure which should be presented first. We'll just excerpt from the top: According to the Beijing News, a meeting of propaganda department heads was held yesterday to unveil the city's latest plans to control online content, plans which place microblogs firmly at the centre of propaganda efforts. ...

The State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television is a yawning cunt of beigest ninnies and bacillus. It's written right there in its mission statement: Our function is to research and promote the insipid, hackneyed humdrum of popular media while bowdlerizing, inside the abysmal recess of our cave of stupefaction, all that is good, interesting, real, or artful. ...

Japan's highly respected daily The Asahi Shimbun suggested in an article on Monday that Xi Jinping was unhappy with the way the "media control division" handled last week's Southern Weekly ordeal. Specifically, Xi was unhappy with the way Liu Yunshan, chief of the propaganda department and a longtime Hu Jintao guy, forced newspapers around the country to carry a hardline Global Times editorial. ...

Sina Weibo was recently aflutter with Yi Nengjing, also known as Annie Yi, Inō Shizuka, and formerly Wu Jingy. As Tea Leaf Nation tells us, born in 1969 to a political family, Yi has been somewhat of an atypical pop star, often clashing with media and remaining outspoken even at the cost of potential endorsements. She's taken her influence to new territory. ...

China’s Internet censors are really outdoing themselves with the Southern Weekend scandal. Not only have they blocked searches for “Southern Weekend” on Sina Weibo and other microblogs, they’re making some attempts to block discussion within the Chinese diaspora. Some writers at Tech in Asia conducted a little experiment today with WeChat (Weixin), a Chinese texting app developed by Tencent, and found tryin ...

Two big Southern Weekly updates this morning. First, it appears the ripples have spread to Beijing News, a sibling publication to Southern Weekly under the ownership of Nanfang Media Group, where the top publisher has resigned instead of publishing a pro-government editorial. ...

A remarkable message was published recently on Sina Weibo, supposedly written by a company manager who goes by @geniune_Yu_Yang -- an account that has since been deleted. Prompted by perceived public misunderstanding of Sina Weibo's handling of the Southern Weekly story, the writer posted a screenshot of text that illustrated the how and why of its censorship policy, which has been translated in full by Oiw ...

China Digital Times, with its indispensable series on leaked directives from the "Ministry of Truth," published this amazing leaked memo from China's propaganda department yesterday: Central Propaganda Department: Urgent Notice Concerning the Southern Weekly New Year’s Message Publication Incident: Responsible Party committees and media at all levels must be clear on three points related to this matter: ...

For the first time in more than 20 years, according to SCMP, a major newspapers's editorial staff in China has gone on strike to protest government censorship. They were on the streets this afternoon in Guangzhou, outside Southern Weekly's offices, scattering chrysanthemums and other flowers, periodically chanting for democracy and human rights. It's been basically peaceful and without incident. ...

It began as a strongly worded letter. When journalists at the Guangdong daily paper Southern Weekly returned to work on Thursday to find a section had been altered by a propagandist -- headline changed, article replaced -- they published an open letter demanding "an investigation into the incident." They named names, in particular accusing Guangdong propaganda chief Tuo Zhen of editorial hijacking. The lett ...

Google, the company, has quietly stopped its practice of displaying warning messages to Chinese users who search for sensitive terms on its service. "At the same time, they deleted the help article which explained how to use the feature," writes GreatFire.org. "This indicates a new development in the relationship between the Chinese government and Google." Cool? ...

The page editor at Southern Weekly, a Guangdong daily newspaper, left work two days ago thinking his section was set. The next day, he and everyone else discovered a pro-government introductory message in their paper, headlined "Pursuing dreams," that no one had previously seen, according to SCMP. ...