section_path: Sociological factors/China
section_name: China
paragraph_text: China
  
  Confucianist & Neo-Confucian orthodoxy, with its emphasis on ritual and propriety, have traditionally looked down upon humour as subversive or unseemly. Humour was perceived as irony and sarcasm. The Confucian Analects itself, however, depicts the Master as fond of humorous self-deprecation, once comparing his wanderings to the existence of a homeless dog. Early Daoist philosophical texts such as Zhuangzi pointedly make fun of Confucian seriousness and make Confucius himself a slow-witted figure of fun. Joke books containing a mix of wordplay, puns, situational humour, and play with taboo subjects like sex and scatology, remained popular over the centuries. Local performing arts, storytelling, vernacular fiction, and poetry offer a wide variety of humorous styles and sensibilities.
  
  Famous Chinese humourists include the ancient jesters Chunyu Kun and Dongfang Shuo; writers of the Ming and Qing dynasties such as Feng Menglong, Li Yu, and Wu Jingzi; and modern comic writers such as Lu Xun, Lin Yutang, Lao She, Qian Zhongshu, Wang Xiaobo, and Wang Shuo, and performers such as Ge You, Guo Degang, and Zhou Libo.
  
  Modern Chinese humour has been heavily influenced not only by indigenous traditions, but also by foreign humor, circulated via print culture, cinema, television, and the internet. During the 1930s, Lin Yutang 's phono-semantic transliteration yōumò (幽默; humour) caught on as a new term for humour, sparking a fad for humour literature, as well as impassioned debate about what type of humorous sensibility best suited China, a poor, weak country under partial foreign occupation. While some types of comedy were officially sanctioned during the rule of Mao Zedong, the Party-state's approach towards humour was generally repressive. Social liberalisation in the 1980s, commercialisation of the cultural market in the 1990s, and the advent of the internet have each—despite an invasive state-sponsored censorship apparatus—enabled new forms of humour to flourish in China in recent decades.