A handful of popular Web dramas were taken offline in Jan. 21, Thursday, by China's Web regulators. Most of the dramas that were taken off were shows that were adapted from popular Chinese novels, such as dark detective dramas.
The dramas were taken down due their vulgar, bloody and superstitious nature. One of the dramas was taken down as a request by the "relevant department," and would resume streaming the show after "optimizing" part of its content, China Real Time quoted Le.com as saying in a statement.
One of the dramas that was recently pulled out is the smash rom-com hit "Go Princess Go" which was viewed for more than 2.4 billion times on Chinese video site Le.com. The drama tells a story about a modern Chinese man who accidentally travels back to the ancient times and turns into a princess.
Known for its unique plot that generated a lot of buzz on social media, the show included some sexual scenes and language. These proved to be unacceptable to a traditional Chinese television show.
"The Lost Tomb", on the other hand, is a fantasy novel series about tomb raiding. The web drama garnered many fans due to the solid fan base of actor Li Yifeng, who plays the lead character in the story.
Since tomb raiding is considered illegal behavior, the show had to significantly change the script from the original novel in order to adhere to China's censors. Chinese web dramas are known to have looser censorship compared to TV, as they show more violent and sexual content that is deemed inappropriate by traditional broadcasters.
Meanwhile, Chinese TV fans were furious when the most expensive TV drama ever made was cut off the air in December 2014, after showing a few of its characters in low-cut costumes. While the TV drama "The Saga of Wu Zetian" returned, the shots were cropped and edited to cut out the characters' cleavage.
The drama first aired on commercial satellite station Hunan TV, but was removed a week later due to "technical reasons," as cited by Daily Mail. Viewers soon complained that the editing damaged the show's historical accuracy.
Check out the before and after edited shots of the "The Saga of Wu Zetian" below: