Society

Henan to set up anti-porn alert in karaoke bars

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-12-25 07:34

Taking its cue from Chongqing municipality, Henan province is setting up a karaoke "filter system" that sounds an alert when a song with vulgar content is played.

About half of the 110 major karaoke bars in Zhengzhou, capital of Henan, have already been installed with the surveillance system, Wang Tianhong, an official with the provincial cultural department, was quoted by local media as saying yesterday.

The campaign is expected to be extended to the whole province next year.

Wang said the system will send out alerts if consumers sing songs containing obscenities. But there was no specific list of offending words to be tracked, he said.

Wang also clarified that the alert system would help the authorities delete songs with bad words and people will not be fined for singing such songs.

Earlier this week, more than 170 large karaoke bars in Chongqing were told to install an anti-pornography surveillance system to track songs with obscene content, as part of a government drive against pornography and organized crime.

At least 10 songs containing what authorities consider vulgar words, including Nightmare, Even the Pig Smiles, Conquer the World and Pleasant, were deleted during police raids on 11 karaoke bars last week.

The Chongqing Evening News reported that a music video of Conquer the World praised a disguised Chinese mainland cadre who wanted to take French women to Japan to film adult videos and urinate outside the entrance of the White House.

Censors from the Chongqing cultural department warned karaoke bars that their businesses could be suspended if operators did not remove all the offending songs before Friday.

However, consumers soon complained that the so-called anti-pornography system was just a government ploy to make money.

The Guangzhou-based Nandu Daily reported yesterday that the system, developed by the Cultural Market Development Center (CMDC) of the Ministry of Culture and offered to Chongqing's karaoke bosses for free, actually had two additional functions - lottery games and advertising. The system would also track copyright violation. Karaoke bar owners would end up paying more to use the audio-video products as a result.

Hu Yueming, spokesman for the CMDC, revealed on Tuesday that the surveillance system, developed in 2006, was launched in Chongqing as a pilot program. The extra functions were added by the local bureau of culture.

Zhang Wei, an employee at the Chongqing Construction Office of the CMDC, told Chongqing Economic Times that the revenue from hotel advertisements and lottery will go to the karaoke owners and advertising companies, not to the government.

China Daily