Starsky and Mao

SHANGHAI -- Nobody in China is interested in politics. They're either too busy getting rich or staying alive to worry about the government, at least in any serious sense.\nWell, a few people are interested in politics -- intellectuals, political prisoners, some students. Oh, and the Communist Party. The Party is very interested in politics. Or at least in keeping the rest of the population uninterested.\nThe Party's goal is straightforward, but the tactics can be surprising. A few days ago, for instance, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television ordered the highly-rated prime time television cop drama "Hot Pursuits" be taken off the air. \nAn April 9 article in the Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post reported the government canceled the show, which is based on real-life crimes in the northeast China city of Harbin, because its portrayals of corrupt officials hit too close to home.\nIU East Asian Studies Professor Ethan Michelson said incidents of overt government censorship of the media are common. "Reporters regularly get fired for running embarrassing stories," Michelson said in an e-mail interview.\nThe government closely monitors the entertainment media, too. Chinese television stations today have to fight for viewers in an increasingly competitive marketplace, but their political constraints leave them with few choices about what to show. "The most popular solution has been to publish and broadcast sleaze. It's not threatening politically, and it sells," Michelson said.\nEveryone benefits: television viewers get entertainment, television stations get advertising revenue and the government even gets a chance to "educate" the people about the heroic work of the police and the courts while showcasing what Michelson calls "morality tales showing what happens to people who stray from the correct path." \nPart of the message of these morality tales is that the central government and the Communist Party are committed to ending corruption. Corruption is a real problem for the Party because it undermines the legitimacy of the regime's claim to work for the people. Therefore, during the past few years, the government has carried out high-profile arrests and executions of corrupt officials. Using the media to amplify this anti-corruption theme is simply an extension of this policy.\n"[Beijing's policy] is part of a long socialist tradition going back to the Mao era, (and also prominent in the Soviet Union.). It has always been acceptable to expose and criticize mid-level officials as a way to divert attention away from problems at the top," Michelson said. \nThus, the presence of corrupt officials per se on "Hot Pursuits" wasn't a sign of any liberalization of the media, nor does the show's cancellation imply the government is taking a newly hard line, Michelson says. It just means the show had slipped from promoting a view of anti-corruption palatable to the government to one Beijing just couldn't accept. \nThe Party's policy is risky. Anti-corruption zeal can go beyond what the government wants and could even cause local officials to oppose the central government, East Asian Studies Professor Robert Eno said in an e-mail interview. After a time, in other words, attacks on government officials can become attacks on the government itself.\nWhat could prove most troubling for the Party is the shift away from easy-to-censor mass-media technologies to the Internet and other new communications infrastructures. For example, in the Internet café in which I write these columns, I often see young Chinese watching foreign films and television shows with Mandarin subtitles on their terminals.\nEven though the government has tried to censor the Internet, the costs are too great for any such effort to be completely successful. And the more overt government efforts to control the media become, the more people will become interested in politics.