China bans a video of children singing a protest song by British rock band Pink Floyd. Government internet censors appear to have deleted the clip showing students performing “Another Brick in the Wall” on a busy shopping street.
China has blocked a video showing schoolchildren singing and dancing to British rock band Pink Floyd’s famous protest song “Another Brick in the Wall.” In the video in question, young students from an art school in Sichuan province are seen wearing black T-shirts and caps performing a choreography to the lyric “we don’t need mind control.” This is reported by the British “Telegraph”
The video was originally published on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok. American China watcher Byron Wan noted that the video’s original content was removed just hours after it was posted. A message on Douyin subsequently announced that the content was missing and may have been deleted.
According to Radio Free Asia quoted by The Telegraph, while the school’s channel on Bilibili, a Chinese video-sharing website, offered links to other songs performed at the same venue, “Another Brick in the Wall” was missing.
Pink Floyd’s song, which sold more than four million copies worldwide in the late 1970s and reached number one in the British charts, protests authority, conformity and mind control in the education system. That message doesn’t seem to be going over well in China, where the government has made increasing attempts to promote patriotism in classrooms in recent months. In October, the Chinese government passed the Patriotic Education Law to confront challenges such as “historical nihilism” and protect “national unity.”
Both the context of the deleted video and the school’s intentions remain unclear. As The Telegraph further reports, the school called Let’s Music confirmed in a statement on May 7 that they wished to comment on the “current situation”, without providing further details.