SHANGHAI — For two years, Larry Lang relished his role as China's business talk-show king.
On Friday night television, the Taiwan-born host of "Larry Lang Live" railed against corporate corruption and other ills of China's market reforms. The clean-cut, telegenic finance professor boiled economics down to ordinary chatter and he struck a nerve with folks disenchanted with the sagging stock market and widening income disparity.
But this month, Chinese officials pulled the plug on his program -- the latest move by Beijing to censor influential critics of its policies and to control information disseminated to the public. In the last year, the government has jailed journalists, banned dozens of newspapers and restricted searches on the Internet.
Online, many Chinese quickly voiced support for Lang, whose writings and opinions are widely available on the Web.
China Business Network, the Shanghai-based producer of the show, said the 49-year-old Lang was taken off the air because he didn't qualify for a government certificate for TV and radio hosts. CBN refused to elaborate, and Lang declined to comment.
Analysts, though, weren't surprised that Lang's show was shut down.
Mainland Chinese and foreign economists in China regarded the Wharton-educated Lang as a free-thinking, fast-talking commentator, yet his views were caustic and considered one-sided.
"Lang went too far.... His words intensified social conflicts," said Yi Xianrong, an international finance researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Lang's half-hour show made its final broadcast March 3, two days before the start of the National People's Congress, China's legislature.
During the 10-day session, Communist Party leaders sought to drum up support for the government's new rural reform programs, amid increasing protests from farmers upset about land seizures and corruption, something that Lang has criticized.
"He tapped into a lot of latent discontent on China's less-than-perfect privatization record," said Stephen Green, an economist at Standard Chartered Bank in Shanghai.
In some ways, Lang had become too famous for his own good. "He's a celebrity now.... There aren't that many people who have achieved that level of popularity and influence outside of the party," Green said.
