Last week the Beijing Administration for Industry and Commerce announced a ban on eight magazines, the majority of which were illegally-published ghost story collections.
At a local newsstand this weekend, Danwei found two titles that weren’t on the list: Ferocious Ghost Stories (猛鬼故事) and Liao Zhai Ghostly Pulp (鬼话聊斋).
These are thin, shoddily-printed magazines with muddled registration information. They contain short horror fiction and dirty jokes from the Internet and are illustrated with poor-quality downloaded images. Seems like the same sort of stuff that the BAIC was complaining about last week – spooky stuff that might harm the mental well-being of school children.
But flip to the back of the magazines and you’ll find advertisements targeted at a slightly more adult market. The back cover of Ferocious Ghost Stories uses scantily-clad models to advertise ringtone downloads, SMS fortune-telling, sexy movies and pictures, and risque SMS stories.
And inside Ghostly Pulp, the clothes come off completely. Advertisements for chat services offering things like “excitement that breaks through the moral baseline” on the inside cover. And text ads in the back pages that advertise dodgy lock-picking services, spy equipment, satellite dishes, gambling machines, ATM card copiers, and X-ray goggles. The unlicensed press is full of this stuff, and it doesn’t seem to have gotten any less prevalent after repeated campaigns to clean it up (see links to previous Danwei articles).
Both magazines contain a strangely equal-opportunity ad for “Young woman’s aphrodisiac powder” that promises to “let him (or her) become completely intoxicated with you.”
- Earlier on Danwei: Women in prison, Cribsheet for the yellow press