China censors news about female celebrity affair with senior CCP official: Report
Dec 31, 2021
Beijing [China], December 31 : China's censors have tried to clean the Internet of the news about an affair and potential marriage between Chinese starlet Tong Liya and one of the China Communist Party's (CCP) most senior propagandists, Shen Haixiong.
Tong -- an entertainer and Xinjiang native of the Xibe ethnic group -- announced her divorce from film director Chen Sicheng earlier in the year, according to Taiwan News.
However, this month China's social media sites erupted with news that she recently remarried powerful state-media mogul Shen Haixiong, the deputy minister of the CCP's Central Propaganda Department and the president of the China Media Group.
Though some reports about Tong remain unconfirmed, they hit a nerve with the censors. Such was the speed of erasure that "the quick censorship itself became somewhat of a spectacle" per WhatsonWeibo, with all posts on the topic Tong Liya's Remarriage completely vanished, according to Taiwan News.
However, China authorities could not quash all the follow-up reports. Tong soon went to the police to request extra assistance in combating the online rumours.
Users desperate to continue discussing the scandal later resorted to foreign languages and even Morse code, per WhatsonWeibo. There was a lot of outrage about the extent of the censorship, per one Vice reporter, according to Taiwan News.
The case is supposedly being investigated by Beijing police.
