Starr Report Has Red Chinese Officials Blushing

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 9, 1998 | by Eli Lehrer, | Stephen Goode

Deciding that it's simply too smutty for the eyes of virtuous people, China's Communist government has banned distribution of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's report on President Clinton's dalliances with Monica Lewinsky -- all of it, not just the racier portions.

The Associated Press, or AP, reports that the ban is unlikely to have much of an effect in China's increasingly free market of ideas, which only recently felt liberal enough to allow the first production of Turandot, Puccini's opera about Imperial China, to be performed in the People's Republic since the late and unceasingly unlamented Mao Tse-tung took charge in 1949.

One detail in the AP's dispatch, however, is especially informative: A source told the wire agency that China's propaganda ministry tried valiantly to put together an edited version of the Starr report. No doubt it was intended as "proof" of the decadence and corruption innate to capitalism, as Marxists tend to call the system in which the people of the West do business. However, the comrade gave up the task as impossible.