Shanghai bans 'Vagina Monologues'

Shanghai has banned the famous international play 'Vagina Monologues', a theatre piece that unlike Moby Dick does not focus on whales. The news, brought to me by AFP, does not come as a surprise. "Moby Dick" was one of the few foreign novels available in Shanghai when I arrived ten years ago.
"Written by Eve Ensler, the play, based on several hundred interviews with women around the world, celebrates women's sexuality and focuses on the abuses women suffer around the world," describes AFP. "Women interviewed in the play come from all walks of life, including prostitutes, women raped in war. The play has been performed in 110 cities over 39 countries since 1997, often to fight violence against women and raise awareness about women's rights."
AFP qualifies Shanghai as a city that is "considered to be more liberal in its social attitudes, compared to the rest of China". That now is unfortunately not true for the cultural scene in Shanghai, where Beijing has a much more liberal tradition. Main problem in Shanghai is that the rather conservative Cultural Bureau has a final say in all cultural matters. In Beijing there are much more government departments available and artists can go to another department, when - for example - the municipal bureau would be not forthcoming with the necessary licenses.
Shanghai has made more often a fool of itself, internationally. Some things change not that easy. We might have to wait until the Shanghai Expo in 2010.

Update: Just walked over the campus of the University of Michigan and saw I could go to Vagina Monologues here in Ann Arbor. Would still be different if I could go and see it in Shanghai.

Update 2 In Shanghai they should maybe get a subscription on the Financial Times,. The British papers suggests this weekend drastic change of the censorship culture in TV and theater. I'm not too sure, I need some urgent lunches with my rather cynical friends in the Chinese media who think I'm always too optimistic about the changes in their industry.
Lifting the ban on foreign producing productions (and I still have to see how far that goes) is still rather different from broadcasting those productions. AP rightly recalls what happened when CCTV discovered what the US soap opera "Friends" really was about.