China and Music

    Today, I'm going to talk about probably one of the biggest cases of music filtering and censorship in the world today--Chinese music regulations.

    Since the 1940's, all music in China is regulated by the government; meaning, if the government doesn't approve of their people listening to a song, then the people are not allowed to listen to it. If an artist wants to market an album in China, or to even perform a concert in China, they must provide a full lyrics sheet for each song as well as proper proof of copyrights. This is due to China's sensitivities towards "offensive" and pirated music.

    But the government wants to not only control any music coming into the country via CD's or live performance, but they also want to expand to internet music--disabling searches for music.

The "Guidelines on the Development and Management of Network Music" issued...by the Ministry of Culture have the stated purpose of preventing problems,... pirated uploads and downloads,and content that "offends" ethnic groups or "affects social stability". 

-Xinhua, ChinaDaily 

     With sites like YouTube and such, nearly anyone can make music, and thus there has been a massive flood in online music recently. With countless songs being uploaded viral for the world to hear, it becomes literally impossible for the government to keep up with their system of censorship. They simply cannot govern all of these songs.

    How could they possibly keep up? Well, three years ago, they went ahead and blocked the iTunes store completely and demanded big-name sites like Google to live up to their own strict music regulations (which would mean blocking all music from searches and providing full lyrics and song copyrights for every song, which would entitle it to show up on searches once more).
    More recently China established a newer music copyright system with the firm R2G. They provided a public site for music-holders to register their songs with proof of copyright, and then all service providers are required to take down these copyrighted works and to disable searches to them within a 24-hour time period from when the work was proven to be copyrighted. More information here: http://musically.com/blog/2011/05/04/chinas-new-music-copyright-protection-guidelines-include-24-hour-takedown-deadline/

    Now--for Chinese citizens, what all this means is, in comparison to the rest of the world, you get a severely limited selection of music that has been approved by the government, none of which could be viewed as morally offensive, none of which could be seen as giving China or the Chinese government a bad portrayal, and none of which could encourage acts which are illegal. Basically, if you think of the government as a single being, the music you're allowed to listen to is being controlled by one person's ideas, as many Chinese citizens probably do not share these same sensitivities to music content. What it is the fear for the Chinese government to even allow the slightest chance of being disempowered by music--and that's what their sensitivity really is.

John R.