It has everything to do with the birthrate and when the CCP thinks is the deterioration of Japan and South Korea's demographics.
Right or wrong, they don't want it in China.
The pan-Asian pop era in China is dead, I think. The haters who attacked Chinese idols and fan groups and the CCP both got what they want. There won't be many Chinese idols in KPOP unless they never want to return to the Chinese market. There won't be Chinese money and fans that people attack even though it supports their faves -- we'll see how many KPOP groups survive now without the C-Bars and -Cafes soing bulk buys.
For me, the biggest tragedy is this happened right after INTO1 was formed from Chuang 2021. It was a beautiful pan-Asian CPOP group that could have been the beginning of a new era. All that is now gone -- just memories of the great IP and Chuang programs lasted for four glorious seasons.
China's war on effeminate men | The Spectator
China's war on effeminate men
Beijing wants to enforce traditional masculinity
12 September 2021, 8:00am
An example of the sort of effeminate men Beijing feels threatened by is hard to locate in Western pop culture. The problem for regulators is not sexuality.
...
One of the first signs of a potential assault on effeminate men came when English-language news reported on a social media post titled, ‘Do you know how hard the CIA is working to get you to love effeminate stars?’. The short essay was published by an account called Torch of Thought, which is linked to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
The article introduced the figure of Johnny Kitagawa, a Japanese-American impresario who was plugged into the American occupation’s efforts to rebuild pop culture in vanquished Japan. Torch of Thought paints this now-dead talent manager as a paedophile Svengali determined to end warlike masculinity and turn Japanese men into kittens.
When Japan’s economy imploded in the 1990s, South Korea took up where they had left off. South Korea left Japan far behind in the androgyny arms race. When androgynous Korean boyband Super Junior broke into China in the early 2000s, the trend was established. The niangpao were here to stay. But now the National Radio and Television Administration wants them gone.
The decision by a Chinese censor to address the issue may seem uniquely bizarre, but it comes after both Japan and Korea went through their own debates about masculinity in crisis. In those countries, the counterweight to androgynous idols had been the strong, silent salaryman. He put on a tie every morning, as solid and reliable as the firm where he worked. Even if his daughter liked boys with floofy hair, she was going to marry a man like her daddy, get pregnant, quit her job, and pop out the demographically required number of children.
But as both countries did away with the idea of employment for life, cajoled women into the workforce and made dual incomes a necessity, the lone male breadwinner was no longer a workable notion.
The result of all this has been cratering birth rates, an epidemic of men reaching middle-age without losing their virginities and a society trapped in an enervating permanent adolescence.
Figures within the Chinese leadership can see what’s on the horizon.
