 |
| Joey Qi (right) and co-host Yang Liu record the Unemployables |
Things are getting worse for the growing band of podcasters who simply want to talk freely. They are there, they are in China, they are talking freely (if obliquely). And they are -- they fear -- in danger of being shut down.
Xi Jinping’s China. Repress, suppress, depress.
.. as the medium [podcasting] grows in popularity, its content may fall victim to the pressures of commercialisation and censorship. Podcasters are concerned that more money and corporate sponsorship will drown out niche, individual voices, and that its increasingly mainstream status will attract more government censors.
“I think the space is getting smaller and smaller,” said Yang Yi, co-host of award-winning podcast Left/Right and founder of JustPod, a Chinese podcasting company.
“If a podcaster is podcasting for this reason [free speech], they can stop now. Because it will be scrubbed within a year or a year and a half.”
Chinese podcasters cover a range of niche topics, from hi-fi sound systems to user interface design. Yang estimates that although the number of corporate-sponsored podcasts is growing, as many as 90 per cent of podcasters are independent or amateur. The rest are produced by big companies, particularly venture capital firms, and he expects this number will increase.
“Companies are now saying ‘I want my own podcast’, in the same way they wanted their own WeChat or Weibo [accounts] in the past,” he said. [Read more....]
