Hong Kong (CNN) -- "Big Brother is watching you." This is the sinister maxim repeated throughout George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four," his dark portrayal of life inside an authoritarian state characterized by its omniscient and paranoid leadership. Fortunately this kind of dystopian nightmare is confined to fiction for most of us -- or more recently the world of reality television with the phenomenally successful Big Brother show, where groups of hapless "housemates" try to outlast each in an isolated environment where their every move is monitored 24 hours a day. And now the show is coming to China's small screen, an irony that won't be lost on many in a country that purportedly has more people employed to censor the Internet than its army (the world's largest) has soldiers.
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Launching in early 2015, the first-ever Chinese version of Big Brother will air for ten weeks
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Will follow the format of the hugely successful reality show popular across the world
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Comes at a time when China has been clamping down on "excessive, vulgar" content
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