In a move that has sent shivers down the collective spine of Britain's floppy-haired commissioners of dross, China has declared war on 'soft porn micro-dramas'. Yes, those brief, sticky bursts of non-carnal carnality that infest phones from Shanghai to Szechuan have been deemed a threat to public decency. Meanwhile, in the green and pleasant land, our own broadcasters are waving the flag of 'free expression' while peddling filth that would make a docker blush.
Let us parse this absurdity with the care of a bomb disposal expert dismantling a device made of gammon and grievance. China's crackdown is not about censorship as we know it. It is about protecting the nation's spiritual health from the drip-drip-drip of degenerate content masquerading as entertainment. These 'micro-dramas' are the literary equivalent of a wet slap: short, sharp, and leaving a nasty taste. They are designed to hook the viewer with a flicker of thigh or a flash of cleavage before cutting to a cliffhanger. It's a cigarette for the soul, a quick drag of depravity before the daily grind resumes.
But the BBC, tottering on the edge of irrelevance like a drunk at a train station, has rushed to defend the indefensible. 'Free expression!' they cry, as if the right to broadcast a man in a rubber suit eating a kebab is a cornerstone of democracy. They counterpose London's noble struggle for artistic liberty against Beijing's 'authoritarian' clampdown. And yet, what is this liberty? It is the liberty to produce shows where the only thing harder than the acting is the erectile dysfunction joke, the liberty to commission dramas that are so brittle with virtue signalling they could be used as a suppository.
The hypocrisy is staggering, even by the majestic standards of our insufferable chattering classes. Britain's broadcasters, who once funded by the licence-fee extortion now scrape by on Netflix's leftovers, have become the moral guardians of the most easily offended generation in history. They will cut a scene for a poorly judged ethnic stereotype but will gleefully broadcast a woman simulating a sex act with a fridge. The line between 'art' and 'dirt' is drawn with a wet finger at the whim of some Oxbridge graduate who thinks a working-class accent is a 'creative choice'.
China, by contrast, looks at these micro-dramas and sees not art but a symptom. A symptom of a society that has more money than taste, more time than sense. They see the glut of content that reduces desire to a commodity, that turns the human form into a lure for clicks. And they say: enough. This is not moral panic. This is a society with the backbone to say that some things are not for sale. That a nation built on the sweat of its proletariat, the vision of its dreamers, and the steel of its ambition does not need to wallow in the gutter of 'bonk-bandit bootleg' to feel alive.
Of course, the British response will be to sneer. We will send a documentary crew to interview a 'porn-persecuted' micro-dramatist who looks like a startled ferret and speaks in buzzwords. We will wring our hands about 'chilling effects' and 'slippery slopes'. But let us be honest: the only slippery slope here is the one that leads from a 'mildly saucy' drama to a diet of pure algorithmic filth, fed to us by 'content providers' who care as much for our souls as a butcher cares for a pig's. China's move is not a curtailment of freedom. It is a pruning of decay. It is the recognition that a society that cannot regulate its own lusts is a society that will soon have nothing left to desire but its own destruction.
So, raise a glass of airport gin, dear reader, to the hypocrisy of the British establishment. They will defend to the death the right of a man to watch a woman undress in 90-second instalments, but they will not defend the working man's right to a job that pays more than an algorithm. They will wrap themselves in the flag of 'expression' while the expression on the face of the average viewer is one of hollow, depressing consumption. China may have its faults, but at least it knows that some things are better left unspoken, unpictured, and un-dramatised. If only our own broadcasters had the same spine. Instead, they have the backbone of a jellyfish and the moral compass of a CCTV camera.
