Sensitive words, or prudish editors?

The “Life” edition of Southern Metropolis Weekly (南都周刊·生活) has a section that follows the latest goings-on in China’s blog-land. Here’s a list from the most recent issue showing the top ten blog posts on Sohu for the previous week (the paper runs similar rankings from Sina, Tianya. and BlogCN).

What’s interesting about the list is what’s left out: the □□ characters represent missing text. Ranked fifth is a post by poison-pen author Song Zude with the title “Gong Li’s ______ has a whiff of _____”; the next item is a post by Night-owl titled “Zhou Xun, where have your _____ gotten off to?” The reader is left to fill in the blanks.

Neither of these entries as posted online had gaps; they were sanitized by the paper’s editors. Song Zude’s piece is actually titled, “Gong Li’s breasts are a bit slutty” (巩俐的乳房有一股骚味). The editors apparently blush at the thought of unmentionables, too – Night-owl’s piece (which is actually a repost of a piece by a different author) concerns Zhou Xun’s panties (or lack of them) in photos taken after an awards show (周迅,你的内裤哪去了?).

One could perhaps understand this daintiness if SMW were a family paper rather than one that ran a gallery of celebrity cleavage in its “Entertainment” edition the week before. What makes this particularly odd, though, is the presence of the (uncensored) fourth entry on the list – a news story about a student from Taipei who was hospitalized with cat-scratch fever: “College woman turns out to be playing at bestiality with cat.”