Phonographs have preserved China's arts

[chuckmoy]

As today's age is moving into the digital world there is less of an emphasis on culture and more of the internet and online living. Buckled with the Cultural Revolution, and the censorship of the press in China, phonograph records of the 1900s-1950s are the only way some recordings and existence of certain Chinese culture has been preserved.

Discogs and YouTube has played a large role in denoting these item's existence, but there is seldom interest even in China of many Cantonese & Operatic or theatrical culture, it is simply an art which is fading away. The huge 8, 12, even 16 part Edison, Victor, and Columbia recordings of Cantonese Opera, and also the recordings of popular songs & Shidaiqu in the 1930s is the little crumbles we have left of Republican China & Shanghai being the Paris of the Orient. Now, the only remains of it are overseas, or in Singapore, Hong-Kong, and Taiwan, and am truly grateful for this hobby, as it has sprung my interest into the musical and theatre history of China.

It is almost sad that such a complex art was attempted to be eradicated by the CCP, and that record collectors and the phonograph community would be what preserved it's remains.

[Inigo]

Let alone the modern dictatorship emerging within the so called democratic civilization, which imposes on us the political correctness which is killing any cultural sample of other times that are now seen as devilish.
We are dangerously forbidding our past ≠ we'll have to repeat it and the modern progress (so called) it's making us fall in censorship of what is not agreeable to the modern gurus...
They will forbid books, or what is worse, edit them to make them politically correct, so will do with films, songs, etc
How many times I play records that in modern socialist Spain frighten me of being possibly accused by some correct neighbours, because they are machist, or whatever other thing, because of the lyrics... which can be offensive for certain collectivities. What you are experiencing in the US because of certain songs...
Cultural dictatorship and censorship is the cancer of modern culture.

[epigramophone]

Totally agree. We should not judge the attitudes of the past by the attitudes of the present.
If bad things were done in the past we should learn from them, not edit them out of history.
I find that the best way to respond to political correctness is with ridicule. Alternatively just ignore it.