SPECIAL REPORT
ruption among Party officials dwindled. Anti-corruption writers, ap-
prehensive of the undocumented ban, began to regard the genre as
taboo and avoided touching on the subject. Television production
companies no longer attempted to buy any anti-graft scripts. “No
one was willing to throw his money into water,” Lu Tianming said.
Fan Ziwen, deputy director of the Supreme People’s Procurator-
ate’s Film and Television Centre, told ChinaReport that it was crime
dramas that the SAPPRFT aimed to punish. As crime dramas domi-
nated the television industry, many scriptwriters sought to grab view-
ers’ attention by excessively exposing too much of the darkness and
violence in their programmes. Anti-graft dramas, as a branch of crime
dramas, had unfortunately become involved.
Writers such as Lu Tianming and Zhou Meisen publicly expressed
strong disapproval of the ban.
“The rigid rule has aborted a series of outstanding anti-graft dramas
in the past decade,” Zhou told ChinaReport.
Lu Tianming insisted on differentiating “anti-corruption dramas”
from “corruption dramas.” He argued that the latter focus on dem-
onstrating corruption, while the former highlight the “action against
corruption,” which promotes the positive energy and social justice at
play. Thus it was unfair to banish anti-corruption programmes from
the screen.
Lu became a bold rule-breaker as he wrote another anti-corrup-
tion novel High-Latitude Trembling (2006) and sought to adapt it
for screen. Backed by private sponsors, High-Latitude Trembling was
approved for broadcast on four municipal satellite channels. As Lu
recalled, it was the only anti-graft drama ever allowed to be broadcast
on the nation’s satellite channels during the decade of silence.Loosening Up
In 2014, a few industry players sensed the situation was beginning
to loosen up.
The CPC Central Committee for Discipline Inspection, the Party’s
primary anti-corruption body, questioned the SAPPRFT in 2015
about the bleak reality of anti-corruption television production – the
anti-corruption campaign had been vigorously carried out since the
18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2012,
so why wasn’t there a single TV drama with a related theme?
“We’ve already received the task of creating at least two anti-corrup-
tion films and three television series per year, and these works must be
finely produced,” Li Jingsheng, then director of the Television Series
Administration Bureau under SAPPRFT, disclosed to media in mid-
2015.
In October 2015, Fan Yugang, director of the Supervision Bureau
under SAPPRFT, clearly defined the principles of anti-corruption
writing at a television production seminar.A scene from TV drama Heaven Above A scene from TV drama Absolute Power