“Clean up the Screen”

Focusing on the “Clean up the Screen” campaign (2002 to 2013), this chapter seeks to offer an explanatory framework for understanding television regulation in China in the 2000s. It argues that the SARFT's attempts to curb the “excesses” of entertainment television programs cannot be understood outside three dominant discourses: the CCP's governance crisis, the moral crisis, and the ecological crisis of the Chinese media. Questioning the efficacy of the regulatory zeal focused on content rather than structure, it further argues that both the perceived excessive entertainment and the state's regulatory efforts are developments integral of, and internal to, the political economy of Chinese television, described in this chapter as the “disjunctive media order.”