Chinese Officials Praise OiNK Shutdown*

jharv | October 24, 2007 8:45 am

Because a “group of conservative songwriters” have pinpointed the problem among Chinese music fans. It’s the Internet that is evil, “poisoning youth with weird lyrics and lustful themes.” And they are begging China’s young Web users to “resist the incursion of unseemly content, abandon vulgarity.” Of course, the Chinese have a far different definition of “vulgar” than the country that produced Too $hort.

Delegates singled out online hits, including “Na Yi Ye” — “That One Night” — by Xie Jun, a song about a couple who get drunk and spend the night together. “That one night you didn’t refuse me!/That one night I hurt you/That one night you were all tears,” are the raciest lyrics.

I always feel vaguely depressed when I read something like that. Not in any kind of “repressive regime” sense–just that an influx of American pop can still take their culture so much lower.

China Song-writers Decry Unhealthy Pop Tunes [Reuters]

*We assume. There had to be some Chinese users among those 180,000, right?