It's true though, the rules from the censorer are vague and inconsistent. The way it works is if a piece of production has buy in from the government then then its much more likely to get through censorers regardless of how spicy it is.
Where are these rules stated? Again I haven't found any sources. Especially regarding "violence" and "ghosts" which nearly every single TV airing drama has. The only I've found is that productions cannot compromise national security and explicit sexual content is not allowed for under 18.
Wukong had a lot of buy in from multiple provincial governments (Shanxi in particular) as well as CCTV.
This honestly sounds incredibly conspirational. It was created by a studio smaller than the ones that made Dustborn.
If censorer tries to shoot it down the next day they're going to start getting calls and political pressure from all the government stakeholders, and that's something bureaucrats would rather do without so they just greenlight it all the way.
It's like how Let the Bullets Fly can have some very "problematic" take on early CPC history depending on your read of the movie. But seen as the production has the personal patronage of Jiang Zemin no censorer would dare to say the movie needs to be banned because it doesn't fit with CPC values, and I know the party's values better than The Elder himself.
It's not just let the bullets fly but the vast majority of productions.
If there were real official rules that these productions are not permitted, what's preventing a rival company from just taking them to court? Actually people already do it all the time regarding sexually explicit content as a way of competitor sabotage in gacha world, because it is malleable enough.
I think it's important to look at the actual facts not what some hearsay is. Maybe China had once or twice redlighted a horror production for having potentially too scary impact on teens or something like this, but nothing I can find portrays any more specific than just on security and sexual content. In general where there is censorship there will be rumors, this also applies to our enemies across the sea, where people constantly alledge the changing/removal of plot points, removal of topics etc. Yet many of these rumors are pure hearsay or fabrications.
What is more likely, that occasionally 5% of extremely explicit productions are killed, or 95% of productions have some abstract yet not officially stated banned content, yet are unbanned because they were personally greenlit because they have connection with the government. To be perfectly honest, the latter theory sounds like American cope about a "corrupt" Chinese government that only let their friends make media.
