A show that’s mandatory viewing for school pupils and parents had an opening number by the group New F4, who star in a Taiwanese teen soap opera. Detractors called the quartet “pretty girls that cannot have babies”; the state news agency declared them “slender and weak” and fretted about the effect these “not men but not women” would have on the youth of the People’s Republic. Then defenders started speaking up, among them (believe it or not) the military newspaper People’s Liberation Daily.