Chinese government bans foreign animation from prime time tv

Paul

Paul

Ghost of Animes
Administrator
According to Anime News Network, the ever radical Chinese government have banned any animation produced outside of China from airing on "prime time" TV (between 5pm till 8pm) amid frustrations that American and Japanese cartoons are proving more popular than the country's own domestic efforts. Naturally this new rule opens up more space for China's home grown cartoons to thrive.
 
In many ways such blunt censorship is wrong- though I'll be interested to see whether this results in some great animation coming from China in a few years time.
 
Not really anything new there then, the chinese government are into using high levels of censorship every where, just try using the internet there, they worked out a deal with google so that all non-pro-chinese websites were listed as banned
 
Hovis! said:
The real question is do the Chinese do its own animation?

Viva la hair-brained powers!
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It does and has done for some time but I have never seen any of it. Japan also outsources some of its inbetween animation to Chinese studios occasionally (but not that often that I can see).
 
Gawyn said:
Hovis! said:
The real question is do the Chinese do its own animation?

Viva la hair-brained powers!
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It does and has done for some time but I have never seen any of it. Japan also outsources some of its inbetween animation to Chinese studios occasionally (but not that often that I can see).
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Learn something new everyday! :D

Thanks for the info. :)
 
Well, studios in south Korea do a lot of in-betweening and have even released a few features of their own (Sky Blue for instance, iirc) so there's no reason why China, with its rich history and culture, couldn't do the same.

Unfortunately their long-standing policy of strict censorship prevents ideas coming in and out of their domestic industry - after all, the beginnings of anime and manga in Japan were greatly influenced by Western cartoons and comic books of the 1950s. I don't doubt that the talent in China is there (they've done some awesome live-action films) but cutting themselves off like this can only hinder things.
 
Meh, the anime fans will just use bittorrent. I can't imagine there was much good anime on China TV anyway.

To me this seems less like outright censoreship and more like the stated aim of getting more Chinese animation on air for the benefit of Chinese animation studios.

Then again I don't know much about the politics behind it, I suppose it could be another item in the general bad feelings between China and Japan, and the government doesn't really want Japanese culture playing so much of a part (or perhaps so much of a positive part) in Chinese television viewing and popular culture.

Hmm, maybe we should ask Chris what he thinks of this...
 
I think this is censorship.

Kids, young kids will go to bed around or bfore 8pm so having all foreign cartoons show after this means they won't see any.

And there are hadly any Cartoons on that late at night over here anyway. The Chinese government are restricting the amount of knowledge its people have about the outside world. I know quite alot about american culture from watching american programes. So kids over there are being brought up not knowing about other cultures.

Meaning they will either grow a hatred for other culture as they aren't the same or a strange curiousity about the world.

I have a funny feeling the Chinese goverment and going for the latter and that isn't right.

The most dangerous weapon we have angainst the chinese isn't arms, weapons or bombs. Its information. If a war breaks out all the world would have to do is flood China with information about its government and the world.
 
I think some people are looking too far into the Chinese government trying to get their homegrown shows more publicity.
 
subedii said:
Meh, the anime fans will just use bittorrent. I can't imagine there was much good anime on China TV anyway.
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Do you really think that China would allow bittorrent and bittorrent links sites through the Great Firewall of China? They have one of the most restrictive policies with regards to the internet of any nation on Earth and I doubt they would be happy with people watching things that they downloaded off the internet and could contain who-knows-what.
 
Gawyn said:
subedii said:
Meh, the anime fans will just use bittorrent. I can't imagine there was much good anime on China TV anyway.
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Do you really think that China would allow bittorrent and bittorrent links sites through the Great Firewall of China? They have one of the most restrictive policies with regards to the internet of any nation on Earth and I doubt they would be happy with people watching things that they downloaded off the internet and could contain who-knows-what.
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There's the great 'firewall of China', and there are still ways around it.

Even if they block off the specific sites, actual torrents are still viable, especially if they make use of the encryption feature which so many download programs now have. This measure was largely introduced to defeat Traffic Shaping by ISP's, since the ISP won't see anything other than raw data and won't be able to tell the format of it (i.e. won't be able to tell that the data is actually a torrent being downloaded, it will just look like any other data transferred across the internet). Even if they completely banned anything to do with the bittorrent protocol (unlikely, but possible, especially given the government at hand), as long as a person can find their access to a torrent (a tiny file which they can even receieve in e-mail as text if they're really pushing the restriction), the rest largely takes care of itself.

Then of course there are other measures either in use or developement. The Tor network. Onion routing. The freenet project. The Ultrasurf project (I only recently heard about this one, sounds interesting). Even proxy servers (although these aren't nearly as effective). Wikipedia has some good articles on those if you want to learn more, some really interesting stuff happening with them.

All it takes is that clever people have found and continue to find ways around this (and I'm sure China has no shortage of tech geeks :mrgreen: ). They then make programs which allow everyone else to do so.

At the moment in China, I would agree that net access is heavily restricted, and accessing what the government doesn't want you to see is difficult. But it is by no means impossible. I would actually rate getting torrents via encryption as probably being easier than trying to browse restricted websites in China.

The Firewall that China has isn't a static programme. It's more like a constantly updating arms race. People find ways around it, then the government tries to update again.

Who's going to win in the end? I honestly couldn't say.
 
It's a real shame, I mean one of these days, the information being with-held from the public eye is going to reach breaking point and all terribleness will follow. May even lead to a civil war....
 
Given how We don't even need such rullings to put our own swill in favour of things infantly better *COUGHcramptwinsCOUGH*. I can only say how sorry I feel for the chinese for this.
 
Guyver 0 said:
doesn't everyone deserve the right to know whatever they want? china aren't getting that right.
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China doesn't agree with you on that point. They activel try and stop the people from being overly educated and making up their own mind. They should just accept what the Chinese government tells them and be thankful for it is what the Chinese government believes.
 
Gawyn said:
Guyver 0 said:
doesn't everyone deserve the right to know whatever they want? china aren't getting that right.
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China doesn't agree with you on that point. They activel try and stop the people from being overly educated and making up their own mind. They should just accept what the Chinese government tells them and be thankful for it is what the Chinese government believes.
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Those DAMN DIRTY APES!!! ::sobs::

(yay for political incorrectness!)
 
Guyver 0 said:
The most dangerous weapon we have angainst the chinese isn't arms, weapons or bombs. Its information.
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I feel like a bit of an **** having this as my first post in a forum but don't you think you're being a little reactionary by turning this into an 'us against you' situation?

Fair enough the issue is a matter of censorship...but it's also one of promoting homegrown product in an increasingly competetive market. Maybe it's just me but my gut reaction is that this really isn't going to limit anyone's civil liberties because anyone who really wants the material is going to be able to find it on VCD/DVD/bootlegs.

I'm really not trying to burst in and start flaming or anything and I do hope you understand that, Guyver 0, but I'm kind of a tiny bit offended but the way this issue has been presented.
 
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