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Media Shenanigans
Film ratings system "news" is a five-year-old interviewPosted by Joel Martinsen, February 8, 2009 12:52 PM
![]() Tong Gang in 2004 On February 2, Beijing Business Today ran a report under the headline "Tong Gang: A film ratings system will not permit Cat-III films." The article reported that China had completed work on a law that would implement a film ratings system without opening the door to porn, and featured extensive quotes from Film Bureau director Tong Gang. Implementing a film ratings system is a contentious issue that has been kicking around for years, so Tong's disclosure, if correct, has the potential to bring major changes to the domestic film industry. Too bad it's not true: the director did utter the words quoted in the article, but he said them in an interview with The Beijing News in 2004. But it was too good of a story to fact-check: excerpts from the article were re-printed in China Culture Daily, a newspaper run by the Ministry of Culture. That article then appeared on the Ministry's website, where it was quickly picked up by major online news portals. Xinhua wrote up an English-language article citing the Ministry of Culture website as a source:
On Friday, the Beijing Youth Daily called the Film Bureau for confirmation and was told, "It's fake news. Director Tong has not expressed any opinion on a movie ratings system recently. We're currently looking into the matter." The newspaper did some digging and discovered that the Tong Gang quotes were identical to a report from that ran in the Jiangnan Times on February 24, 2004 (itself a summary of the earlier interview in The Beijing News). How it happened is still a mystery:
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Comments on Film ratings system "news" is a five-year-old interview
They idea that authorities might be ready to tacitly concede that Chinese adults can handle and deserve more choices than children was probably too good to be true.
Woh, bada-boom bada-bing. Is it just me, or is the Internet really sucking these days here in China? NY Times, Facebook, Google, etc. all having big f'in problems loading up...
I sense a great disturbance in the Great Firewall of China.