The European Broadcasting Union has blocked a Chinese broadcaster from airing the Eurovision song contest after it edited out LGBT elements from an online stream of the semi-finals on Tuesday.
Mango TV, a video-streaming site linked to one of China’s most watched channels, Hunan TV, blacked out the performance of Ireland’s Ryan O’Shaugnessy, during which two male dancers depicted a fraught relationship. The site also pixellated a rainbow flag waved during another performance.
The EBU said on Friday it had terminated its partnership with Mango TV because the censorship was not in line with its “values of universality and inclusivity and our proud tradition of celebrating diversity through music”.
Conservative attitudes towards LGBT issues in China are slowly changing. Homosexuality was decriminalised in 1997 and removed from the government’s list of mental disorders in 2001, but discrimination and practices such as forced gay conversion therapy are still used.
Last month, LGBT activists pushed the popular microblog Weibo to reverse a ban on gay content. Hunan TV, known for its progressiveness, has previously made shows featuring LGBT content.
Although Eurovision is not widely popular in China, news of the censorship circulated around social media on Friday. One Weibo user wrote: “Is this really that sensitive? If things keep going this way, soon even rainbows in the sky will have to be blurred out.”
Another wrote: “SARFT is really disgusting,” referring to the country’s entertainment regulator, the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television. It is unclear whether regulators ordered Hunan TV not to show O’Shaugnessy’s performance or whether the channel made the decision independently.
Hunan TV purchased the rights to broadcast the contest for the first time in 2016 and one of its executives told ESC Daily, a website reporting Eurovision-related news, that she hoped China would follow in Australia’s footsteps and one day be invited to compete.
