Freedom of Speech

The WaPost has two interesting pieces on speech issues in Asia. First comes the not so surprising news that free speech in Vietnam is a dicey thing. Speaking your mind can still get you arrested. In China not only do they restrict what you say but now the Reds are trying to tell people how they say things:

To millions of Chinese, particularly boys and girls in the provinces who constitute the main audience for pop-oriented variety shows, Hong Kong and Taiwanese speech has come to mean being cool. The reason is simple. Most of the music and performers making teenage hearts throb here have long originated in the freer atmospheres of Hong Kong and Taiwan.

As a result, some hosts and hostesses of mainland variety shows have taken to throwing Taiwanese slang words and Hong Kong tones into their on-air speech, associating themselves with the cool radiating from those two centers of the Chinese-language pop industry. Saying "very pretty" with a drawn-out hao hao piaoliang ye as they do in Taiwan, for instance, has been branded more with it than the direct hen piaoliang of standard Mandarin.

But for nearly a year, the government broadcasting authority has been engaged in a purification project, designed to halt what officials feel is the creep of vulgarity and non-Chinese influences into programs offered by the country's 3,000 national, provincial, city and county stations. The campaign fits into a general tightening of government controls over broadcasting and other media, including additional Internet rules banning "unhealthy news stories that will mislead the public."