Regulators Clear Na Ying's Unplanned Tribute to Liu Huan
Chengdu's culture bureau has ruled that Na Ying's fragmentary on-stage tribute to the late Liu Huan, sung without a permit amendment, was not a setlist change — closing a three-day debate over whether mourning needed paperwork.
The question that hung over Na Ying's Chengdu concert for three days has been answered, and the singer is off the hook. In a notification posted on September 29, Chengdu's culture, radio, television and tourism bureau ruled that her impromptu performance of "The Curved Moon" — sung the night after pop veteran Liu Huan died — was a fragmentary singalong within the audience-interaction segment of her show, not a complete performance, and therefore not a program change requiring re-approval. No penalty follows.
As covered here when the inquiry began, Na Ying told the September 26 crowd that "devastating news" had reached her that morning: the death at 63 of Liu Huan — her mentor, she said, and a great contributor to Chinese pop music. Dressed in black, she sang the song he made famous, and the audience answered with applause.
China's rules for large commercial performances run on approved setlists: changing the program means re-approval under the commercial performance regulations, with fines possible. The first answers looked ominous. The district-level bureau said it was still investigating and would "handle it according to law" if the song had been added without paperwork; the hashtag asking whether an act of mourning would be fined trended for days. One widely shared account of the night said her team had applied for and secured the copyright license from the song's rights holder on the day of the show — the paperwork that could be done in hours, against the approval that could not.
Commentary argued the case was about discretion as much as rules. Qianjiang Video's editorial noted that the Administrative Punishment Law requires penalties to be proportionate to circumstance, harm, intent and attitude, and warned against an approval system that behaves like a vending machine — while stating the counterargument just as firmly: if rules yield to sentiment this once, they yield to any emotion next time. The final notice ran to fewer than 100 characters, was signed by the municipal bureau rather than the district one, and did precisely that: it drew a line between a few bars sung to a grieving audience and a change of program, and thanked netizens for their attention and supervision.
The ruling now stands as a template for the industry's next sudden goodbye: a fragment in an interaction segment is not a setlist change. Whether a full, unrehearsed song would survive the same reading is the question the notification leaves open.