Gagging of Gaga shows China’s real fears

Awoman looking like an extra-terrestrial praying mantis upholstered in red leather strode on to the stage at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, 50,000 outrageously costumed fans screamed, and I understood why China is so terrified of Lady Gaga.

For there is nothing so unwilling to be regimented and controlled as Lady Gaga in full voice, an erotic, exotic ubercelebrity who also contrives to be the girl next door, Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta from New York.

Gaga’s Chromatica Ball last week was the first UK performance in seven years by this raw-meatwearing, bisexual feminist who sings of the absolute right to selfexpression because she, and everyone else, is Born This Way.

Simultaneously channelling Freddie Mercury and Princess Diana, she is both a fashion freak and defiantly ordinary, which is why she is one of the most powerful pop stars in history and, in the view of Beijing’s Communist leadership, a serious threat.

Lady Gaga was first banned by China’s ministry of culture more than a decade ago for ‘‘being vulgar’’. The ban was lifted briefly but then reimposed in 2016 after she met the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader.

State-controlled media condemned the meeting, media organisations were instructed to stop promoting and distributing her music, and Lady Gaga’s name was added to the official list of foreign forces hostile to China.

Gaga has legions of Chinese fans worshipping in secrecy, but the Chinese Communist Party has done its best to make one of the most visible people on the planet disappear

. The Chinese broadcast of the 2019 Oscars blacked out her image; her cameo role in Friends: The Reunion was carefully excised by Chinese streaming platforms.

China’s attempted gagging of

Gaga is only one element of a pervasive and expanding censorship campaign.

In 2018, Peppa Pig was banned because the tiny pink cartoon porker was perceived to be a subversive symbol of the counterculture, promoting ‘‘gangster values’’.

People adopting Peppa Pig tattoos were condemned by the state-run tabloid Global Times as ‘‘unruly slackers roaming around and the antithesis of the young generation the party tries to cultivate’’.

The assault on Peppa Pig was part of a wider crackdown on foreign children’s books. Even Winnie-the-Pooh is a suspect in modern China, given his perceived resemblance to the portly president Xi Jinping. One of the most consistently censored images on Chinese social media is a photo of Xi alongside a toy car with Pooh Bear on it, an association perceived to undermine the Chinese leader’s dignity.

Censorship is embedded in Chinese political ideology. During the Cultural Revolution, all books seen as anti-communist were censored and banned, with public book bonfires. Libraries containing ‘‘offensive literature’’ were sometimes burnt down.

By the time of Mao’s death in 1976, only a handful of books, mostly written by Marx, Lenin and Mao himself, were openly sold or borrowed.

The broad grip of modern Chinese censorship is well known: radio jamming of foreign broadcasts, the Great Firewall of China that keeps out all influences deemed subversive or immoral, and China’s avowed determination to maintain ‘‘cyber-sovereignty’’, governing, patrolling and manipulating its own cyberspace.

Beyond and beneath this overarching determination to control what Chinese people see, hear and therefore believe is a wholesale assault on popular culture: children’s books, cartoon characters, sitcoms and pop music.

The intensity and reach of such censorship has vastly increased under Xi. In September 2020, China’s ministry of culture and tourism announced it was ‘‘strengthening the content review and on-site supervision’’ of all television.

Anything considered contrary to China’s cultural and moral norms or state beliefs is liable to censorship: on-screen nudity or violence, vulgar ‘‘low culture’’, visibly tattooed hip-hop artists and anything seen to promote or tolerate LGBTQI+ culture.

Earrings and ponytails on men are blurred out on screen, and last year China’s National Radio and TV Administration added a ban on ‘‘sissy men and other abnormal aesthetics’’ to its list of forbidden subjects.

While such bans may seem silly individually, collectively they add up to one of the most comprehensive and efficient censorship campaigns in history, the mass imposition of cultural conformity.

Gaga poses a threat less for her political views, her visit to the Dalai Lama, and her support for LGBTQI+ rights than through her determination to be, and encourage others to be, entirely different. Do What U Want, she sings, and Beijing trembles.