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China To Crack Down On "Undesirable" Games
The Chinese government is getting ready to launch a new round of content restrictions for online games. Kou Xiaowei, a senior official with the General Administration of Press and Publication, said, "Although China's online gaming industry had been hot in recent years, online games are regarded by many as a sort of spiritual opium and the whole industry is marginalized by mainstream society." The article points out that China has already "banned children from Internet cafes and last year ordered their owners to enforce time restrictions after several cases involving obsessive players dying of fatigue after marathon game sessions." We've also seen Chinese restrictions on player-versus-player content for kids, as well as required content modifications such as removing skeletons in order for games to be sold there.
Do as the Chinese do....actually China has come a long way in the last decade, and its difficult to really get a clear perspective from our cultural context. I just hope that our relations with them, and the rest of the world improve, and that we are all tolerant of one another. One thing I do know about the Chinese, having been vary close to a gentleman from Shanghai, a graduate business student who now works here, is that in China their greatest fear is CHAOS. That one is not on the top of our list, but it gives a little insight as to why they may often seem heavy handed. Lets try to understand where they are coming from, when we hear about how they seem to be. I always liked Chinese food, and the people are cool too.
Can someone who understands Chinese culture a little better than I explain why skeletons are considered so taboo?
My wife is Malaysian Chinese. I don't have a complete answer for you but I can make a couple of observations:
Its just that the Chinese have a thing about death. Its not discussed in polite company. They avoid the number 4 because the way it is spoken it sounds like death.
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Can someone who understands Chinese culture a little better than I explain why skeletons are considered so taboo?
I wouldn't really claim to understand Chinese culture, but I did happen to read an article explaining this particular point, so I can give you a second-hand answer.
A very deep issue in Chinese culture and thousands of years of history and mythology, is ancestry and the spirits of ancestors, bordering on ancestor worship. Anywho.... authoritarian regimes tend to take one of two approaches to religion. Either there's Nazi model where they seize upon the predominant religion (evangelical Christianity in the Nazi's case) and impose it in all the schools and throughout society as a tool of power and control by claiming "Gott Mit Uns" (God Is With Us), or there's the Stalin model that seeks to exterminate religion as a competing threat to it's own power and authority.
In Chinese culture the idea that the spirits of The Ancestors might disapprove of government policies and government actions, the idea that The Ancestors might grant strength and power to humble peasantry, to fight and win against an impossibly larger and more powerful (but corrupt) foe.
Think of our Robin Hood story, and cross it with the mythology of pretty much every martial arts movie you have ever seen where some guy beats the crap out of entire armies worth of enemies, and cross that with a mythology that idolizes and idealizes the power and nobility of ancestors, and which believes that the spirits of the ancestors still live and watch over us and that their power can be called upon.
I also think we view skeletons as generic mindless creepy-ghoulies, empty shells animated by magic, but I think they view them more as animated by the spirit of a powerful ancestor. Consider out "Night of the Living Dead" movie mythology, if you see a zombie you just whack it with a shovel, they are only dangerous if you get mobbed. On the other hand imagine a "zombie" who was the full mental-and-spiritual embodiment of King Arthur, you are NOT going to win in combat against him, and if you oppose him you're pretty much automatically "the bad guy".
Hopefully I didn't butcher Chinese culture too badly with my substantial ignorance. The Chinese government is opposed to any and all religion, considering it a threat to their own authority and their own stability. And of course they are most keenly allergic to the most deeply rooted mythologies of their own culture.
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If China ever had a state religion, (and it did back in the Imperial days) it would be ancestor worship. The Chinese have a strong belief in the power of the dead. A skeleton shows disrespect of the dead as obviously this body was unburied and now the spirit is angry and in the world. It's sort of like consigning the person to an eternal hell. Proper burials are a big thing. It is indeed a cultural taboo, maybe like how witchcraft and wicca is taboo in large portions of America. The Chinese government, up to the Last Emperor in the early 1900's, seriously believed in the Mandate of Heaven and superstition. Supernatural evidence such as ominous dreams and the testimony of ghosts was used in court cases as late as the 1890's. The Dowager Empress' support of the Boxers during the Boxer rebellion, was based on her belief that they literally posessed magical kung fu powers- that they could deflect bullets, and defeat the colonial powers in the country. The government may have rejected superstition, but as we in America know, just because the government rejects religion, doesn't mean the whole country is not tainted by it. Replace ALL of our Christian influenced stuff with Ancestor Worship/Taoist/Buddhist synchrotism influenced stuff, and you get China. The Chinese government has long been the protector of cultural sensibilities, it's one role that the Chinese government takes on today. Cultural control is a key part of Confuscian society, not just government. Even Democratic Asian countries such as Japan, Taiwan and South Korea promote 'social repression and lack of individual expression' as it were, through strict educational regimes based on memorization, and encouraging a highly disciplined and hierarchal family structure. To the CCP's credit, they've done much more for women's rights and the equal rights of minority in China (societally) than the above mentioned Asian democratic countries. The above countries harshly disapprove of things like interracial marriage and women acting outside of or neglecting 'the traditional role', and never had anything like the Civil Rights movement to change old perceptions on race/eugenics. That doesn't justify censorship of course. If they could just get with the program and institute some kind of genuine elections and government respect for human rights, then mainland China would be one of the most open and free countries in Asia.