Blog posts of family members asking for justice following their relative’s suspicious death in police custody have been deleted by Chinese censors, potentially to quell discourse over alleged police brutality. The official police record claims that Huang Guohui, who had reportedly trespassed onto a nature reserve in Hainan, had “committed suicide in the interrogation room by hanging himself”. However his daughter and other family members say his body was found in the room covered in wounds.
Of all the contentious cultural material China’s censors could crack down on, an inoffensive 1990s boy band ballad seems like an odd option.
China’s Ministry of Culture this week issued a new blacklist of 100 songs including the innocuous I Want it That Way by the Backstreet Boys, Katy Perry’s Last Friday Night and Beyonce’s Run the World (Girls). Although the majority of the blacklisted tunes came from Taiwan or Hong Kong, Lady Gaga leads the pack with a total of six banned tracks: The Edge of Glory, Hair, Marry the Night, Americano, Judas and Bloody Mary. Music websites must remove by 15 September or face prosecutions.
There is still no word on whether Guangzhou’s very own Back Dorm Boys have also been blacklisted.
A major Chinese online commerce site, Taobao.com, has banned sales of software used to bypass internet censorship. The site said it took the action on its own and received no official orders. A notice on the site said virtual private networks (VPNs) and Internet protocol proxies — common tools for evading web filters — were being used to illegally visit foreign websites. It told merchants using the site to stop selling them and said the accounts of violaters might be cancelled.
In addition to last week’s suspension of Zhao Lingmin, editor of Guangzhou-based news and current affairs magazine Window on the South, the magazine’s president, Chen Zhong, has been removed from his post, though not dismissed. The changes have been linked to Zhao’s 25 July interview with Taiwanese historian Tang Chi-hua, in which Tang had criticised Sun Yat-sen, an early 20th-century political leader referred to as the “Father of the Nation.”
