BEIJING — When the wife of a popular sportscaster grabbed the microphone at a pre-Olympics reception and blabbed about her husband's infidelity, the inevitable happened.
An audience member with a cellphone captured the whole embarrassing episode, including the mortified husband trying to hush his wife and security guards fluttering about helplessly, and posted footage worthy of "The Jerry Springer Show" on Tudou.com, a Chinese clone of YouTube.
All sorts of irreverent footage ends up on Tudou and other Chinese video sites -- spoofs of public figures, off-beat animated films, Taiwanese music videos and real-life street scenes that display the spontaneity and edge missing from state-run television.
No doubt that's the reason the Chinese government is striking back. A harsh new law that took effect Friday forbids any content "which damages China's unity and sovereignty; harms ethnic solidarity; promotes superstition; portrays violence, pornography, gambling or terrorism; violates privacy; damages China's culture or traditions." More damaging still is a requirement that firms distributing online video or audio be state-owned. If enforced to the letter, the law could kill the most vibrant media in China today.
"We are still alive and well and in business as of today, but we don't really know what will happen next," Gary Wang, the 34-year-old chief executive officer of Tudou.com, said in a telephone interview Friday. An engineer, Wang founded Tudou (the name means potato) in 2005 with private venture capital. It is the largest such firm in China, by now streaming an estimated 1.3 billion minutes of video.
Chinese censors routinely order content removed from video-sharing sites. And the firms themselves, trying to ward off trouble, assign their in-house staffs to screen videos before they're posted. But it is a losing battle, with thousands of new clips posted daily.
The biggest taboos for the censors are politics and pornography. Unlike text, which can be monitored largely through computer programs, videos must be watched, and judgments made, by human beings.
"It is easier to find bad words like "Falun Gong" or "Tibetan independence" in an article than it is to find an exposed nipple," said Kaiser Kuo, director of digital strategy for Ogilvy China. Falun Gong is a spiritual movement that has been banned by the Chinese government.
