30 China The EconomistAugust 29th 2020
2 Kong. Most people prefer to watch live-
streaming of people eating large bowls of
noodles and selling lipstick, or more of the
familiar boy-band clickbait. As everywhere
else, stories about death, sex and money
are popular, says Kou Aizhe, host of Story
fm, one of China’s most popular podcasts.
In one episode a man describes how his fa-
ther, who suffered from mental illness, was
poisoned to death by fellow villagers. In
another, a Chinese documentary-maker
tells a tale of featuring in a gay porn film. A
third discusses agencies set up specifically
to help women break up their husbands’ re-
lationships with their mistresses.Big wide world
Listeners are especially curious about Chi-
nese people around the world. As more of
them work, study and travel abroad, Mr
Kou has noticed that episodes about Chi-
nese in far-flung places like Syria and Af-
ghanistan are a hit. Story fm’s most popu-
lar show this year was about a Chinese
Muslim man who went to Pakistan and
within 15 days found and married his wife,
before bringing her back to China. In a
country of 1.4bn people, Mr Kou estimates
his show gets around 700,000 listeners an
episode. The fact that censors normally in-
tervene only when content goes viral has
given podcasts some space.
The covid-19 pandemic raised some
problems, however. It is hard enough for
podcasters to know where the political line
is in normal times, let alone in a crisis,
when it may move. For weeks during the
outbreak’s early stages, podcasts shared
stories about it. Many shows featured inti-
mate interviews with doctors, journalists
and residents of Wuhan after the city went
into lockdown. Most of them were eventu-
ally deleted as the party recaptured control
of the narrative.
Others have been censored, too. When
“Loud Murmurs”, a podcast about popular
culture, did a show about “One Child Na-
tion”, an American documentary that was
banned in China because it dealt with the
one-child policy, the podcast went viral on
social media. It was eventually censored
but not before thousands had heard it. An-
other episode was censored, the host
thinks, for mentioning China’s former
president, Jiang Zemin, praising a well-
known Canadian comedian’s fluent Chi-
nese. “The thing about censorship in China
is that it is a black box,” says Isabelle Niu,
one of the presenters. “We didn’t know we
weren’t allowed to talk about presidents.”
As a result, podcast hosts admit they
self-censor. “I care most about reaching lis-
teners inside China, the vast majority of
whom don’t have vpns. If that means I have
to sacrifice some of my freedom of speech,
so be it, this is the reality that we live in,”
says Zhang Zhiqi, host of “Stochastic Vola-
tility”, a popular podcast which recentlyhadtorenameandreinventitselfbecause
ofpressurefromcensors.Manyofthemes-
sagesMsZhangreceivesare fromhigh-
schoolanduniversitystudents,oftenfrom
poorregionsofChina.
Allpodcastsavoiddirectlydiscussing
politicalissuesdeemedsensitive bythe
CommunistParty,likethemassdetention
of Muslims in north-west China orthe
HongKongprotests.Butaudioreporting
suitsintimatestorytellingandyoudonot
havetotalkdirectlyaboutpoliticstohavea
fascinatingpoliticaldiscussion.
“Asour industrygrows and becomes
profitable,wewillseemorecensorship,”
predictsYangYi,co-founderofJustPod,a
podcastingcompany.“This iswhathap-
penedtoWeiboandWeChatastheygrew.”
TextandvideoinChinaarealreadycareful-
lyscrutinised bycensorshipalgorithms.
Podcastersworryaboutimprovedtechnol-
ogybringinggreaterscrutinyofaudioout-
put.Ifthathappens,theywillhavetofind
newwaystoprovidetheirthought-provok-
ingcontent. 7A
s china emergedfrom lockdown, a
woman wrote a post on Weibo, a micro-
blog, that has echoed through the long, hot
summer. She was divorcing her husband,
she said, because he would not allow her to
change the surname of her child to her
own. Details of the case were scant, but that
did not stop it lighting up the internet,
shining a new spotlight on the question of
how far Chinese women have come. Phoe-nix Weekly, a magazine, launched an online
poll that drew 47,000 respondents. Almost
two-thirds said that a surname could come
from either parent.
As in most traditional societies, Chi-
nese parents have long preferred sons, and
the usual practice of handing down the fa-
ther’s surname remains a powerful symbol
of that (though women have always re-
tained their surname at marriage). But with
social mores changing rapidly, more par-
ents have started to give babies the moth-
er’s surname, especially in wealthy urban
areas. A paper last month in the Journal of
Population Economics found that Chinese
children with young, educated mothers
from areas with normal sex ratios at birth
were more likely than average to be given
her surname, and such offspring were
healthier and better educated than average.
Almost one in ten newborns in Shanghai
were given their mother’s name in 2018.
Some young couples have compro-
mised and use both surnames in combina-
tion, somewhat like Westerners creating
double-barrelled surnames (though only
one of those names can be legally recog-
nised in China). According to a survey in
2019, the surnames of more than 1.1m Chi-
nese people now form such a combination,
a ten-fold increase on 1990.
Government support for matronymics
has been around since the mid-1990s. Giv-
ing the mother’s surname to offspring was
encouraged within the one-child policy
(which was relaxed in 2016), to persuade
people to be content with an only daughter.
To win them over, officials dug up Chinese
texts about ancient matrilineal societies.
Some wonder, however, whether all of
this is more to do with genealogy than with
feminism. Qi Xiaoying of the Australian
Catholic University says that grandfathers
are urging their daughters to give their sur-
name to one of their grandchildren now
that families can have more than one, be-
cause it assures the continuation of the
grandparents’ line. Ms Qi calls this “veiled
patriarchy”. In-laws now fight over whose
name will go to the son. She says matro-
nymics are more popular in Chinese cities
not because of an assertion of women’s
rights, but because a generation of mater-
nal grandparents has more wealth to hand
down, especially if they are richer than
their son-in-law’s parents.
At least the trend shows that a patro-
nymic is not a foregone conclusion, says
Ms Qi. A survey in 2017 in the south-eastern
city of Xiamen found that 23% of second
children in two-child families were given
their mother’s surname. A couple in the
city of Nanjing, surnamed An and Hui,
called their children An Zihui and Hui
Zi’an, both meaning “the offspring of An
and Hui”. “Genealogy and feminism had
nothing to do with it,” says Ms Hui. “It was
just a way to show our love.” 7BEIJING
Giving a child its mother’s surname is
not just about feminismMatronymicsIn the name of the
mother
Who am I, mum?