How Wee Ng 2026. Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Youth: Disciplining Foreign Influences in Garrison's Gorillas. in: How Wee Ng (ed.) The Chinese Censorship Discourse on Television Dramas: Worrying about the Audience in Postsocialist China Routledge.
| Chapter title | Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Youth: Disciplining Foreign Influences in Garrison's Gorillas |
|---|---|
| Authors | How Wee Ng |
| Editors | How Wee Ng |
| Abstract | This chapter examines the censorship and social discourse surrounding the American television series Garrison’s Gorillas in early reform-era China. Despite its popularity following its 1980 broadcast, the series was abruptly pulled after 16 episodes, amid official claims that it incited youth violence. Through a close reading of how Gorillas was blamed for criminality, and how audiences transgressed by viewing it in socially undesirable spaces such as video halls, this chapter demonstrates how censorship operates productively by generating categories of risk in society: impressionable youth and low-suzhi viewers. These concerns fed into broader disciplinary campaigns, in which foreign media were scapegoated for systemic problems such as youth unemployment and inequality. Against Mao’s iconic praise of youth as “like the sun at eight or nine in the morning,” the series’ alternative portrayals of leadership and heroism rendered youth a potential threat to order. By analysing the intersections of fears surrounding susceptible audiences and the performativity of campaigns to instil social order, this chapter reveals how worrying about “big bad youth” underpinned broader anxieties over post-Cultural Revolution rehabilitation and the ideological limits of reform. |
| Book title | The Chinese Censorship Discourse on Television Dramas: Worrying about the Audience in Postsocialist China |
| Year | 2026 |
| Publisher | Routledge |
| Publication dates | |
| Published | 22 Jan 2026 |
| ISBN | 9781003471684 |
| 9781032749549 | |
| Digital Object Identifier (DOI) | https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003471684-3 |
| Web address (URL) | https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003471684-3 |