ABSTRACT
The timing of the State Council Office's announcement was unusual in the sense that it came toward the end of the country's prolonged negotiations to join the World Trade Organization (WTO). Critics have read the ban as economic protectionism, while China has argued that it is exerting its right to protect 'public morals'-a right given under international trade agreements-which ties in with its broader 'cultural defense' argument. Concerns about cultural imperialism animated debates in the 1970s and 1980s about the most effective means of protecting indigenous media content, most notably in calls by developing nations for a new world information and communication order (NWICO) in the early years of the former decade and in UNESCO's1980 report (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) by the International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems commonly known as the MacBride Report.
