BEIJING — At the end of December, a popular television series chronicling China’s most famous empress suddenly went on a four-day hiatus. When it returned on New Year’s Day, the low-cut necklines and squeezed bosoms had vanished.
Instead, the screen was filled with close-up shots showing only the heads of the female characters in the period piece, which depicts the seventh-century Tang Dynasty, an era when a woman’s beauty was defined partly by plumpness.
No one has claimed responsibility for the awkward cropping, but it is widely believed to be the work of the country’s prudish censors.
The changes have drawn a wave of mockery from the public fed up with ham-handed censorship. Chinese have lit up social media with complaints and jokes, with some posting cropped photos of celebrities and drawings that add in the missing cleavages to show the absurdity of the cuts.
“It was not a public issue, but has become one after shameless officials wielded their powerful administrative powers,” Ren Zhiqiang, a businessman who has been outspoken on social issues, wrote on his microblog. “What people are concerned about is not cleavage, but that a bunch of cultural hooligans are in charge of making approvals.”