'China bans wordplay' -- newspaper

[Guest realmayo]

I just read an article that might be interesting for some people: China wants adverts and other media to stop playing around with altered-idioms.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/28/china-media-watchdog-bans-wordplay-puns

 

It has banned wordplay on the grounds that it breaches the law on standard spoken and written Chinese, makes promoting cultural heritage harder and may mislead the public – especially children. The casual alteration of idioms risks nothing less than “cultural and linguistic chaos”, it warns.

 

“It could just be a small group of people, or even one person, who are conservative, humourless, priggish and arbitrarily purist, so that everyone has to fall in line,” said Moser.

 

“But I wonder if this is not a preemptive move, an excuse to crack down for supposed ‘linguistic purity reasons’ on the cute language people use to crack jokes about the leadership or policies. It sounds too convenient.”

[Demonic_Duck]

Is this real? I know it's the Guardian, but it reads like an Onion article...

 

Assuming it's real, part of me is outraged, the other part of me just thinks it's another policy which will be enforced only occasionally and arbitrarily, until people forget about it after a couple of years.

[Angelina]

真的骂？

 

Didn't know poetry will ever get banned. Here we are. 

[li3wei1]

While they're at it, maybe they could ban irony and ambiguity.

[Meng Lelan]

And I was thinking if China would ever get its own Dr. Seuss, when I saw this thread title. 

[roddy]

I would write to complain, but the related content bit at the bottom informs me that China has banned paper for three months. 

 

I'm pretty sure they've done this some years back, but can't find any links. 

[Hofmann]

I have a feeling they'll eventually target the ZF and 尼瑪 stuff. People will always find a way to circumlocute.

[Mouseneb]

Power grows from the barrel of a pun.

[liuzhou]

So no more crosstalk (相声) on Chinese "comedy" shows. Excellent idea!

[character]

 

“But I wonder if this is not a preemptive move, an excuse to crack down for supposed ‘linguistic purity reasons’ on the cute language people use to crack jokes about the leadership or policies. It sounds too convenient.”

Internet users have been particularly inventive in finding alternative ways to discuss subjects or people whose names have been blocked by censors.

This would be my guess as to the reason.  All the wordplay makes censoring the internet much harder.

[Angelina]

Why don't they ban thinking altogether? It will be easy to censor the Internet. They even blocked Viber by the way. 

[Simon_CH]

It's getting ever more ridiculous. So much about China liberalising.

[Tiana]

This is still quite tame.

If my memory serves me right, there have been times in Chinese history where books are burned and scholars terminated. Intellectuals can be too inconvenient for some people.

[geraldc]

At last African monks will no longer be unfairly maligned!

[Demonic_Duck]

Nor indeed alpacas, river crabs, Nima county in Tibet, or Austrian composer Gustav Mahler as he treks through the Gobi desert.

[c_redman]

The Guardian article is missing an original reference. I think this is it: 总局发出《关于广播电视节目和广告中规范使用国家通用语言文字的通知》 (11/27/2014).

They describe this as implementing announcement "《关于规范广播电视节目用语推广普及普通话的通知》（广发【2013】96号）", which I have so far been unable to find. And the only mentions of it are from posts quoting the original 11/27 announcement. So it's not clear whether they are addressing ways to get around censorship, or are specifically addressing changes to 4-character idioms intending to preserve linguistic heritage.