'Animal Farm' Survives China Censors

Monday November 25, 2002 6:40 AM
BEIJING (AP) - Director Shang Chengjun worried censors would ban his stage version of ``Animal Farm,'' George Orwell's anticommunist satire of a barnyard revolution gone wrong.
His anxiety was misplaced.
The government culture officials who regularly suppress books and movies quickly approved his script about animals who take over their farm, then let a murderous pig called Napoleon make it a dictatorship. The problem isn't the officials, though; it's the audience.
``They don't get it,'' said a disappointed Shang, 30. His play, performed nightly since mid-November, has attracted audiences that fill barely half of a 715-seat theater.
Shang's problem places him squarely in the intricate, often unforeseeable mix of political and cultural risks for the arts in China as the nation opens economically and socially but retains sweeping government controls on expression.
Artists complain that publishers and other arts promoters, no longer state-supported, are more reluctant than ever to back potentially sensitive books, movies and other projects. They need to make a profit and fear that an official ban could bring on bankruptcy.
Those, like Shang, who reach an audience, find that despite surging popularity of Western movies and music, China is still learning modern global culture after decades of isolation and propaganda.
Communist leaders imprison democratic activists but c