The English-language edition of Time Out in China,
'Time Out Beijing', has apparently been banned from distribution by the country's censors, The Times reported back in June. The real reasons why this has happened aren't clear; it seems that China's General Administration of Press and Publications took this step because the magazine 'lacks a required printing permit'. More ominously, an official statement went as far as to deny knowledge of the existence of the title altogether, saying "If there is such a magazine, it wasn't approved by us in the first place."
Time Out Beijing has been published for the last three and a half years without a problem (two years earlier the Chinese
Rolling Stone was closed less than a month after publication for the same problem), and it is said to be one of the country's best-known and most popular English language magazines.
Curiously, there is no indication of this event to be seen in the Chinese section of the main
Time Out site,
http://www.timeout.com/cn/en/beijing/. Things get slightly more confusing still when we checked the Whois details for the domain indicated by various bloggers,
www.timeoutcn.com, as it had only been registered in January 2008. It looks similar to the main
Timeout.com pages, although the underlying structure is rather different. It also has very different registrant details (which are not explained by comparing those to the host company's details either).
However, in light of a statement from a
Time Out Beijing spokesman ('"It is not convenient to say" why the June edition had been banned') it would appear that this wasn't the squashing of a counterfeit title but the gagging of the real thing.
So, it seems fairly clear that, given that it has been banned, this is all part of a massive effort by the administration to step up security as the Olympics approaches. The impact this will have is hardly likely to affect security either way, but it will make it harder for visitors - Olympic and otherwise - to know where to go for food, drink and a general good time. Perhaps this kind of frivolous behaviour by Westerners is what's getting up the nose of the authorities? More seriously, will the GAPP relent once the Olympics is over, or is this the end for Time Out Beijing?
In what seems almost like a political point being made, the link to the online edition of the magazine loads the complete set of pages... with every one of them blank. See
http://www.timeoutcn.com/Magazine/TimeOut_0806_English/default.htmNOTE: the content now appears, so the blank pages may have been a technical glitch. Was this just a hiccup that got blown out of all proportion, or has Time Out effected some kind of deal with China's GAPP?
Blurb, which is published once a year by a group of MA Publishing students, has gone digital. According to Course Director Des O'Rourke, this gives it a significantly wider reach than the print edition; "The 2008 print edition was a bumper 68 pages. The 3,000 print run was quickly snapped up by students in the six colleges. So, in co-operation with Ceros, one of the names behind the ground-breaking Flash-based web magazine technology, Online Blurb uses the same publishing engine as Maire Claire, FHM and Top Gear and the new interactive online magazines Monkey, Welt and iGizmo."
