Graham Earnshaw was the Daily Telegraph correspondent in Beijing from 1980 to 1984, and he's been looking through his clippings, which seem to prove both that China has changed completely and also that China has stayed exactly the same. This spring and summer, Danwei will be publishing a series of these reports from the past. This is today's resurrected item:

An official Chinese newspaper yesterday published a letter from an irate railway worker complaining that too many advertisements featured attractive women with outstanding figures. Such “titillating illustrations” were very unsuitable, the worker said.

He went on: “One paper carried an advert for a type of cloth material which included a curvaceous woman with flowing hair standing on one side intentionally emphasizing her prominent breasts. If all adverts were like this, the effect on public morals would certainly not be good.”

Advertising returned to China three years ago after two decades of being banned as a bourgeois capitalist practice.

Editor's note:

The Beijing News (新京报) has been running a series of articles about the last 30 years of reform, each one quoting an old People's Daily article, a little like this series of Graham Earnshaw's old pieces.

Yesterday's article quoted a CPPCC member who in 1982 had this to say about the popularity of non revolutionary, non traditional pop music that was enchanting the masses in the early days of reform:

"Now they are playing love songs by Teresa Teng (邓丽君) everywhere. It's not only students learning to sing them, even old ladies are singing them, it's really bad..."