The Chinese Censorship Discourse on Television Dramas: Worrying about the Audience in Postsocialist China

This book offers a compelling look at how television censorship in China works not just as top-down control but as interactions between state, industry, and viewers.

As a historical study of the discourse on Chinese television censorship, it analyses debates around the censorship of popular television dramas in China and explores the controversies surrounding the televisual representation of history, violence, delinquency, and vulgarisation. Focusing on the idea of ＂worrying about the audience＂, the book shows how concerns about young people’s morality, social responsibility, and cultural standards shape what (dis)appears on screen. Covering the early reform period to the 2010s, case studies include but are not limited to foreign action series (Garrison’s Gorillas), domestic melodramas (Yearnings), controversial historical dramas (Towards the Republic), Gangtai pop idol dramas (Meteor Garden), and playful wuxia comedies (My Own Swordsman). Each case reveals how censors, producers, and critics invoke imagined audiences--whether impressionable youth or patriotic citizens--to justify cutting or promoting content. By treating audiences as constructed categories rather than immutable groups, the book moves beyond seeing censorship as repression. Instead, it demonstrates how a refreshing take on censorship can shed light on the generation of new content, revive overlooked titles, and frame broader debates about culture, anxieties, and geopolitics. Drawing on regulatory documents, press reports, interviews, audience letters, and parents’ complaints, the book compares both popular hits and hidden gems, demonstrating how the discourse on melodrama, history, and martial arts genres reflects moral and commercial pressures in postsocialist China.

In contributing to the burgeoning field of censorship studies which rethinks censorship as productive, rather than reductive, The Chinese Censorship Discourse on Television Dramas will be of huge interest to scholars and students of television studies, popular culture, censorship studies, Chinese studies, media studies, cultural studies, memory studies, social history, and politics.

How Wee Ng is Senior Lecturer at the University of Westminster, UK, and co-founder of the Association for Curators and Programmers of Asian Cinemas (ACPAC). He specialises in cinemas, media and theatres of the Sinosphere, and the politics of representation in visual culture.