China clipper

The depiction of gambling and drinking is banned online, though the Chinese have traditionally shown much enthusiasm for these pursuits.

No bottoms. No bottoms up, either. China’s new internet censorship guidelines proscribe all that entertains and refreshes. Tightening norms established five years ago to control the world’s biggest online population, President Xi Jinping’s government has put our Pahlaj Nihalani in the shade. Political Chinese whispers are no longer the main target, and a new age of moral control has dawned, precisely when the Chinese middle class is happy to forget the moral restrictions of the Mao era. The prognosis is cultural schizophrenia.

The depiction of gambling and drinking is banned online, though the Chinese have traditionally shown much enthusiasm for these pursuits. Material which “publicises the luxury life” is frowned upon, which means that China’s flourishing yacht-building industry, catering to the new rich, will have to advertise its services offline. Ditto for Shanghai’s harbour-front apartments, which are much sought-after. The killing of endangered species is not permitted. You can only eat them in certain restaurants. The leaders of China’s revolution are not to be belittled, though Chairman Mao himself was notorious for airbrushing them out of official photographs when they fell from grace. And no sex, please, in any of the myriad formats that humanity has dreamed up outside holy matrimony, from adultery to rape. China’s writers and filmmakers can’t even speak of body parts. They are stuck in the Mandarin version of Swiss Family Robinson.

However, the list of 68 proscriptions is not entirely without merit. One, which warns against blurring the lines between “truth and falsity, good and evil, beauty and ugliness”, should be immediately applied to the whole world’s communications. If it were strictly enforced, social media would drop dead, suffering withdrawal symptoms after being starved of fake news. And pornography would find the plug pulled, too. You do know it’s completely fake, don’t you?