Lady Gaga embodies everything China fears

[Meat 18,962]

Full article: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/why-lady-gaga-makes-beijing-gag-in-fear-d2vn7jqp9

Discuss 

[pinknailsemoji 181]

but its paywalled 

[Nite 4,976]

Is it 2016 again? Can't wait for that movie in 2 years 

[Meat 18,962]

8 minutes ago, pinknailsemoji said:

but its paywalled 

Someone help us remove the paywall 

[River 106,325]

1 minute ago, Meat said:

Someone help us remove the paywall 

Pay 💰 

[Nathan 2,079]

Wow, someone woke up and really said ‘nice weather outside, but how does Xi feel about Lady Gaga’

[hELXIG 41,860]

12 minutes ago, pinknailsemoji said:

but its paywalled 

For any paywalled site just hit 'esc' on your keyboard before the paywall pops up. It should load the text but cancel the page from loading any further and letting the popup appear. I just did it and I'm reading the article

Edit: I only got the first two paragraphs of the article   but it usually works

[RAMROD 104,871]

2 minutes ago, Helxig said:

For any paywalled site just hit 'esc' on your keyboard before the paywall pops up. It should load the text but cancel the page from loading any further and letting the popup appear. I just did it and I'm reading the article

Edit: I only got the first two paragraphs of the article   but it usually works

Most ggd users are phone users, gen Z tingz.

[HiddenWeirdo 4,268]

Won't pay for this article 

[KORG 4,756]

"How did China become a democratic country in the 21st century?" 

"Ok so there's this ra ra bitch..."

[hELXIG 41,860]

Just now, RAMROD said:

Most ggd users are phone users, gen Z tingz.

I guess you can tell my age by the fact I hate doing things on my phone   I can touch-type on a laptop, but typing on a phone gives me a headache with my 0 second attention span. Nothing works as well on a phone as a computer. The screen is so tiny and I can't just flick between multiple tabs and get links etc quickly on a phone

[Dojo 19,365]

55 minutes ago, HiddenWeirdo said:

Won't pay for this article 

 

rich hotties of GGD, we summon y'all

[badfaith 5,673]

It means she's doing something right then 

[Tangerine 270]

Spoiler

 

A woman looking like an extra-terrestrial praying mantis upholstered in red leather strode on to the stage at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, jets of flame shot 100ft into the air, 50,000 outrageously costumed fans screamed, and I understood why China is so terrified of Lady Gaga.

For there is nothing so wildly individualistic, so defiant of convention, so unwilling to be regimented and controlled as Lady Gaga in full voice, an erotic, exotic ubercelebrity who also contrives to be the girl next door, Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta from New York City.

Lady Gaga’s Chromatica Ball last week was the first UK performance in seven years by this raw meat-wearing, bisexual feminist who sings of liberty, drugs, addiction, mental health and the absolute right to self-expression because she, and everyone else, is Born This Way. Simultaneously channelling Freddie Mercury and Princess Diana, she is both an extreme fashion freak and defiantly ordinary, which is why she is one of the most powerful pop stars in history and, from the point of view of Beijing’s Communist leadership, a serious threat.

Lady Gaga was first banned by China’s ministry of culture more than a decade ago for “being vulgar”. The ban was lifted briefly but then reimposed in 2016 after she met the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader. State-controlled media condemned the meeting; websites and media organisations were instructed to stop promoting and distributing her music, and Lady Gaga’s name was added to the official list of foreign forces hostile to China.

Lady Gaga has legions of Chinese fans worshipping in secrecy but the Chinese Communist Party has done its best to make one of the most visible people on the planet disappear: the Chinese broadcast of the 2019 Oscars blacked out her image; her cameo role in Friends: The Reunion, singing the Smelly Cat song with Lisa Kudrow, was carefully excised by Chinese streaming platforms.

China’s efforts to control western pop culture may seem absurd but the attempted gagging of Lady Gaga is only one element of a pervasive and expanding censorship campaign.

In 2018, Peppa Pig was banned because the tiny pink cartoon porker was perceived to be a subversive symbol of the counterculture, promoting “gangster values”. People adopting Peppa Pig tattoos were considered particularly seditious, condemned by the state-run tabloid Global Times as “unruly slackers roaming around and the antithesis of the young generation the party tries to cultivate”.

The assault on Peppa Pig was part of a wider crackdown on foreign children’s books, specifically aimed at limiting western cultural influences and the “influx of ideology”.

This is not the first time the Chinese government has perceived danger in the most innocuous cultural imports. In 1931, the censor-general Ho Chien banned Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland because it anthropomorphised animals, an “insult” that might encourage the “disastrous” idea that animals and humans are equal.

Even Winnie-the-Pooh is a suspect in modern China, given his perceived resemblance to the portly president Xi Jinping. One of the most consistently censored images on Chinese social media is a photograph of the president alongside a toy car with Pooh Bear on it, an association perceived to undermine the Chinese leader’s dignity.

Censorship is embedded in Chinese political ideology. During the Cultural Revolution all books seen as anti-communist were censored and banned, with public book bonfires. Libraries containing “offensive literature” were sometimes burnt down. By the time of Mao’s death in 1976, only a handful of books, mostly written by Marx, Lenin and Mao himself, were deemed acceptable and openly sold or borrowed.

The broad grip of modern Chinese censorship is well known: radio jamming of foreign broadcasts, the Great Firewall of China that keeps out all influences deemed subversive or immoral, and China’s avowed determination to maintain “cyber- sovereignty”, governing, patrolling and manipulating its own cyberspace.

Beyond and beneath this overarching determination to control what Chinese people see, hear and therefore believe is a wholesale assault on popular culture: children’s books, cartoon characters, sitcoms and pop music.

The intensity and reach of such censorship has vastly increased under Xi. In September 2020, China’s ministry of culture and tourism announced it was “strengthening the content review and onsite supervision” of all television, including talk shows, foreign programmes and period dramas. Anything considered contrary to China’s cultural and moral norms or state beliefs is liable to censorship: on-screen nudity or violence, vulgar “low culture”, visibly tattooed hip-hop artists and anything seen to promote or tolerate LGBTQ culture.

The restrictions play out in myriad small ways, often through self-censorship and a terror of offending the authorities: sensitivity over Winnie-the-Pooh’s belly has extended to images of other AA Milne characters; Justin Bieber may not perform in China due to his “bad behaviour”, notably visiting the controversial Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, seen in China as a symbol of Japanese war guilt; Albania’s entry to the Eurovision Song Contest in 2018 was removed because of the lead singer’s tattoos.

Negative depictions of same-sex relationships are proliferating in Chinese media; earrings and ponytails on men, considered marks of countercultural rebellion, are blurred out on screen; last year China’s National Radio and TV Administration added a ban on “sissy men and other abnormal aesthetics” to its growing list of forbidden subjects.

A regime that sees danger in an imaginary pink piglet is a pretty good definition of political paranoia but while such bans may seem silly individually, collectively they add up to one of the most comprehensive and efficient censorship campaigns in history, the mass imposition of cultural conformity.

Lady Gaga poses a threat less for her political views, her visit to the Dalai Lama, and her support for LGBTQ rights than through her determination to be, and encourage others to be, entirely different. Do What U Want, she sings, and Beijing trembles.

Here’s the full article

[Benji 20,113]

Gaga’s going to be our Vera Lynn for WW3

SLAY!