Satellite dish clampdown in Shanghai

We gotta move these satellite TVs

Last week The Shanghai Daily reported:

Seventeen government departments will launch a joint city-wide campaign to wipe out illegal television satellites that can receive foreign TV programs across Shanghai, the Oriental Morning Post reported today

Authorities including Shanghai Media Group, the industrial and commercial administration, public security forces, the real estate bureau, prosecutors and courts have already released notices to more than 11,000 property management companies across the city about the campaign, the report said.

In many Chinese cities, it costs a few thousand yuan to have a satellite dish and hacked decoder installed in an apartment. As long as Chinese TV continues to be so vanilla, the government will not be able to get rid of these ‘illegal’ satellite dishes.

As an article in The Shanghai Star put it way back in 2002:

The authorities are putting the lid on unauthorized reception of overseas TV via satellite dishes, which number between 20,000 and 200,000 in Shanghai. Will the move differ from previous campaigns?

The image above shows a government worker removing an illegal satellite TV dish from a building in Qingdao, apparently in January this year. The image is from a small gallery posted to a forum website called 17KWS.com, whose slogan is “Let’s watch satellite TV together”. The gallery’s caption says that a team composed of police and SARFT officials climbed on to apartment building’s roofs and balconies, confiscating satellite dishes.

The top comment to the forum post says “Hateful!”