The romance between Gu Hai (顧海) and Bai Luoyin (白洛因), two handsome gay senior high school students from the Web series Addiction (上癮), has caused a sensation in both China and Taiwan.
The program was seen by 10 million viewers on the day of its release in January, setting a new record for China’s television industry and was the most watched show on China’s leading video streaming sites. Netizens on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, it seemed, had become addicted to Addiction.
Then the Chinese government shut the series down.
Photo: Reuters
Early this month, Beijing issued new guidelines for television just a week after the popular gay-themed drama was pulled, banning them from including storylines involving homosexuality and other “vulgar, immoral and unhealthy” content that “exaggerates the dark side of society.”
The disappearance of the series late last month, which triggered an uproar on social media, displays “Chinese authorities’ distinct discomfort regarding homosexuality,” Time magazine reported. Such discomfort is also reflected in China’s handling of The Secret Emotional Life of Zhou Enlai (周恩來的秘密情感世界), a new book about the late Chinese premier Zhou Enlai (周恩來).
WAS ZHOU ENLAI GAY?
Photo courtesy of men’s uno Taiwan
When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) defeated the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in 1949, Zhou became the first premier of the People’s Republic of China, holding the post until his death in 1976. Charming, gentle and sophisticated in public, he presented a modern face as the country’s second most powerful man, serving as a role model for a “new China.”
But a new book, Secret, says that he may have been gay.
“Zhou Enlai was a tragic figure. He was very famous and always under the media spotlight,” the book’s author Tsoi Wing-mui (蔡詠梅) told BBC News. “But there were many aspects of his life that were like riddles and difficult to explain.”
Tsoi’s hypothesis is based on Zhou’s diary entries and personal letters, alleging that he harbored a lifelong love for a schoolmate, and that his sexual orientation would perfectly explain some “mysteries” about his life.
Tsoi said these mysteries include Zhou’s coldness toward his wife Deng Yingchao (鄧穎超), a former chairwoman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, in a “marriage of convenience” that benefited their political purposes.
It also helps to explain his absolute obedience to Mao Zedong (毛澤東), who may have threatened to reveal his secret. After all, Tsoi stressed, homosexuality was seen as a sin against socialism because the communists, somewhat oddly, labeled it “a capitalist way of life.”
Unsurprisingly, Tsoi’s book has been banned in China. Hong Kong entertainer Wong He (王喜) was even cut from a CCTV variety show after he shared on Facebook an article about the book.
The bans on the popular drama and new book make it clear that China has yet to accept homosexuality. Indeed, the Chinese government did not decriminalize gay sex until 1997, and homosexuality was classified until 2001 as a “psychiatric disorder.” The world’s largest country by population has no openly gay politician because that would be political suicide.
LGBT CENSORSHIP
Beijing likes to show its strength through authoritarian gestures, but censorship on homosexuality, like many other human rights issues, merely shows its fear and causes considerable anger among its population.
Shanghai Pride (上海驕傲節) spokesman Matthew Baren recently said that while it is “disappointing” that Addiction has disappeared, “it’s very encouraging to see shows about homosexuality being made in China, by Chinese talent and for Chinese audiences.”
Though it was reported last week that a gay-themed variety show has been rejected by several TV stations due to the sensitivity of the issues it would tackle, Taiwan is considered relatively friendly to the LGBT community and can play a progressive role. By offering greater protection of LGBT rights, it can distinguish itself by upholding the universal value of human rights and set a good example for less progressive societies.
Ajay Verma, a consultant gastroenterologist at Kettering general hospital in Northamptonshire, says our gut is a “complex machine.” “It is constantly providing us with the nutrition we need, initially to grow and develop, and then for us to survive, thrive and repair from injury and illness.” How can we keep it functioning well? Put simply: “Make sure what you put into it is balanced, and that you clear out its waste products adequately,” Verma says. “In a general gastroenterology clinic, the most common conditions we see are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastroesophageal reflux disease, inflammatory bowel disease and constipation,” says Nisha
The arithmetic is straightforward and uncomfortable. By the end of 2025, Taiwan had committed itself to a 50-30-20 electricity mix — half natural gas, 30 per cent coal, 20 per cent renewables. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’s (MOEA) own monthly energy reports tell a different story. Natural gas reached 47.8 per cent of generation last year. Coal stood at 35.4 per cent, comfortably above its target ceiling. Renewables came in at 13.1 per cent, well short of the 20 per cent Taipei had pledged a decade earlier. Installed renewable capacity reached roughly half of the 12 gigawatts (GW) the government
Last week US President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether he would speak on the phone to the President of Taiwan. “l’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody. We have that situation very well in hand,” Trump said. This marked the second time in a couple of weeks he had said he would talk to the President of Taiwan. In 2016 he famously took a call from then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), when he was president-elect. Despite warnings that the apocalypse was nigh because of a phone call, the world quickly forgot about the conversation between two democratically-elected presidents.
May 25 to May 31 Few believed that apples could be cultivated on a commercial scale in Taiwan’s high mountains. When horticulturalist Cheng Chao-hsiung (程兆熊) first proposed the idea in 1955, both American and Taiwanese colleagues dismissed it as implausible, arguing that temperate fruit could not be reliably grown on a subtropical island, especially on rugged terrain. However, it was this terrain in the Central Mountain Range where many Chinese Civil War veterans were resettled in the late 1950s. With limited job prospects and no family in Taiwan, they were placed on cooperative farms aimed toward self-sufficiency. Some say the conditions
RSS