It’s a conspiracy!
Something strange happened here tonight. For a while now Shanghai’s satellite TV reception has been intermittent. Since technically it’s illegal to have one, we all figured it’s the government censoring it.
Tonight I asked my friend to see if hers was working, and we could only get three channels. One was JCTV, which apparently stands for Jesus Christ TV. As you can guess, this was all Christian programming. The next thing we could get was TBN, another Christian channel. The third was one I’d never heard of before called The Smile of a Child. The first thing we saw on there was a show with people in scary-looking costumes, so we changed the channel immediately. Upon flipping to it later, we saw they had a show called Bibleman! This guy and his cronies try to protect the earth from evil, personified by this guy with bad teeth and a mohawk (who looks sort of like the lead singer of the German death metal band Sopor Aeternus). The cronies pray a lot in front of a lighted cross in their batcave-like hideaway, and when things get too hairy, their leader turns into Bibleman!, complete with his Breastplate of Righteousness! and his Helmet of Salvation! Those were the only three channels we could get on the whole satellite network, although they were later joined by one more, Palapa 4 (I think), a Filippino channel with a lot of cooking shows.
It was like some Christian group had hijacked satellite service to China. Bizarre!
June 18th, 2007 at 7:08 am
Whenever the satellite goes out here, we can always still watch the Christian channels. My understanding is that the Phillipines Sattelite people need to scramble the signal every month of so to prevent satellite pirates from stealing their signal. By scrambling it, we need to get a new card for the satellite and then we are all good again. My theory is the christian channels are happy to have as many people as possible and they dont want to take God away from their illegal viewers, as sinners are the ones who need god the most. I don’t think it is related to the Chinese government.
June 18th, 2007 at 7:09 am
Whenever the satellite goes out here, we can always still watch the Christian channels. My understanding is that the Phillipines Sattelite people need to scramble the signal every month of so to prevent satellite pirates from stealing their signal. By scrambling it, we need to get a new card for the satellite and then we are all good again. My theory is the christian channels are happy to have as many people as possible and they dont want to take God away from their illegal viewers, as sinners are the ones who need god the most. I don’t think it is related to the Chinese government.
June 18th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
Hm! That’s interesting!
Man, did most of those shows suck, though.