Off Centre | Five of the best tales of non-Chinese censorship

It is probable that if there was advantage to be had from the sun rising in the evening, the Chinese government would have it so. State media would be full of reports of supper-time breakfasting in Jiangxi province and 1am assemblies of elderly citizens in Shanghai parks.

In the field of economics, presently, China is learning that so long as it permits money to flow freely in and out of the country it cannot sit on interest rates and also expect the yuan’s exchange rate value to hold up. But still it pretends all things are possible; to admit otherwise would be to accept some degree of impotence.

The point, I think, is that China likes control. And nowhere is this more obvious in what it suffers to be said or written about itself. Chinese authorities prohibit the spread of information and accurate reporting about disasters and their own efforts to cope with them; the country’s history under Communism is only sketchily taught in schools; internet users are required to register themselves, the better to “protect their own privacy”; and journalists are never done being locked up. Meanwhile, the Chinese State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) not only acts as a censor for domestic media but increasingly for Hollywood too.

As its transgressors in modern China will attest, censorship is no laughing matter. And yet, and yet: occasionally the whole business just becomes so utterly preposterous and cretinous that it cannot help but add incidentally to the gaiety – in the old sense – of nations to recount it.

In its wisdom the state broadcaster, China Central Television, earlier this month decided to pixelate the face of Hong Kong actor Wong Hei during a popular Sunday evening broadcast. Wong’s crime was having shared a link on social media to a news report about a book suggesting Zhou Enlai, premier of the People’s Republic from 1949 until 1976, was gay. The risk to viewers of beholding his chiseled visage was, you will appreciate, marked.

Donkey-brained, or simply bizarre, acts of censorship are by no means exclusive to China, of course. Here are some more of my favourite recent examples of half-witted censorship from around the world.

Russia