China cancels the Year of the Pig

You won't be seeing these:

Pigs Get the Ax In China TV Ads, In Nod to Muslims

SHANGHAI -- Next month, China will ring in the Year of the Pig. Nestlé SA planned to celebrate with TV ads featuring a smiling cartoon pig. "Happy new pig year," the ads said.

This week, China Central Television, the national state-run TV network, banned Nestle's ad -- and all images and spoken references to the animal in commercials, including those tied to the Lunar New Year, China's biggest holiday.

The intent: to avoid offending Muslims, who consider pigs unclean. "China is a multiethnic country," the network's ad department said in a notice sent to ad agencies late Tuesday.

Save Piglet!
And bring out la caja china.

Update: Eric says that Coca-Cola is pulling its pig ads too.

Update 2 IBlogA commenter Krishna 109 quotes Mark Steyn,

"When every act that a culture makes communicates weakness and loss of self-belief, eventually you'll be taken at your word. In the long term, these trivial concessions are more significant victories than blowing up infidels on the Tube or in Bali beach restaurants. An act of murder demands at least the pretence of moral seriousness, even from the dopiest appeasers. But small acts of cultural vandalism corrode the fabric of freedom all but unseen..."

Update 3 A friend emails asking,

does this mean that China will be losing sufficient food, material joy, home safety, prosperity, abundance, wealth, fertility and reasonable success in all affairs, which the pig symblolizes in Feng Shui?

I don't have the vaguest idea at all.

technorati tags China, Islam, Piglet, pigs