On the lighter side: March 2007 Archives

By Craig Simons | Cox News Service | twincities.com
March 11, 2007

It's a Chinese form of "truthiness" that might make Stephen Colbert proud.

China's Southern Metropolis Weekly magazine recently reported this shocking news: The central government created universal health care for the country's 1.3 billion people, wiped out bribery and reduced the country's wide income gap.

Migrant workers in the southern city of Guangzhou, notorious for its sweatshops, were "happy" and "respected," the magazine reported in its print and Web editions.

Of course, it was political parody and all untrue.

Virtually unheard of several years ago, such blatant satire is part of a radical shift sweeping Chinese culture as Internet use spreads and citizens increasingly evade censorship by couching criticism in sarcastic humor.

China has become so awash in a new wave of sarcastic — and often subversive — media that the trend has spawned a name: egao, literally, "evil work."

The word describes "a subculture that is characterized by humor, revelry, subversion, grass-root spontaneity, defiance of authority, mass participation and multi-media high tech," said a recent editorial in the government-run China Daily.

While the government tightly controls traditional media channels including television, radio and print, "the Internet has given people the chance to express themselves," said Guo Xinghua, a sociologist at People's University in Beijing.

"Egao is a term for how average people are seizing back the discourse," he said.

Last year, the Chinese government issued a list of "Eight Honors and Eight Shames" as part of a campaign to promote morality within the Communist Party. The list included such instructions as "Love the country; do it no harm."

Chinese Web users quickly posted their own lists on the Internet.

One parody included the couplet, "Love your Mercedes and BMW; do not ride a bicycle," which some readers considered an attack on rampant official corruption.

Despite government attempts to limit access to many Web sites, the number of Chinese Internet users has quadrupled since 2001 and reached 137 million last December, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.

>> Read the complete article

By David Barboza | The New York Times
March 04, 2007

WHEN Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue hit the newsstands last week in China for the first time, with the sexy singer Beyoncé on the cover, the competition was fierce.

Readers here had already seen the February issue of For Him Magazine, which features a Chinese singer named A Duo on its cover wearing a white V-neck leotard that reveals every other inch of her rather substantial figure.

Inside, A Duo poses like a dominatrix, clutching her breasts, wrapping her naked body in celluloid and bending, sweat-drenched, over a submissive man.

The racy For Him Magazine also offers tips on “how to do it in five minutes” (because a “sex break is the same as a coffee break”) and features stories with titles like “The Dangerous Sex Journey of QiQi.”

The images and text would hardly be shocking to American or European readers. And the magazine’s photographs are tame compared with what appears in magazines in Japan and other parts of Asia.

But in China, where sex is still a taboo subject and pornography is outlawed by the ruling Communist Party, the images are not only highly provocative but perhaps the latest sign that sex and sexuality are infiltrating the mainstream media.

And this powerful burst of sexual energy seems both a symbol of how rapidly China’s transformation is unfolding and, to some, a harbinger of the troubles ahead for a nation that will inevitably struggle to absorb its newfound freedoms. “There is a fine line between the open mind and sexual indulgence,” said Xie Xialing, a professor of sociology at Fudan University in Shanghai.

Even five years ago, Chinese books and magazines were censored or banned from showing pictures of scantily clad models or publishing content that was deemed offensive or morally corrupt. The only sexual content to be found was in sex education pamphlets or books of nude Chinese women sold as “art works” at big city airports.

Today, however, with China’s economy booming and the government loosening its hold on the personal lives of everyday citizens, magazines are beginning to publish soft-core pornographic photographs, sexual fantasies, even clues about where to pick up call girls.

Popular Chinese Web sites are going further, posting erotic videos and creating forums for women eager to market their sex appeal and post their photographs on the Internet: images of traveling with friends, undressing at home, even striking erotic poses.

“This is a kind of grass-roots sexual revolution,” said Annie Wang, author of “The People’s Republic of Desire,” a satirical novel about the country’s mad race to modernization.

The government announces periodic crackdowns on pornography and often censors sexual content in magazines and on the Web. But since about 2000, the censors have started to look the other way. Political activism is still a no-no in New China. Entertainment is a different matter. Even the Web site of Xinhua, the state-run news agency, offers slide shows of the “10 Hottest Babes of 2006” and “Rarely Seen Photos of Sexy Men.”

>> Read the complete article