China's pop idol contest gets another chance

China's "Super Girl" Li Yuchun, a 21-year-old music student from Sichuan province who won the title in 2005, with 3.5 million votes, performs in Beijing, October 2005.

China's Communist rulers may frown but the wildly popular Chinese version of the "American Idol" song contest has secured approval for a 2007 season, state media reported Wednesday.

Producers of the televised competition will Thursday announce the launch of the upcoming season, and it will be an all-male affair with contestants vying for the title "Happy Boy," the Beijing Times newspaper reported.

Last year's contest was an all-female version under the title "Super Girl," but state regulators only granted approval for this year after insisting that producers avoid the name "Super Boy," the paper added, citing show officials.

No reason was given, but online bloggers speculated that authorities acted on a debate over the Chinese words for "super", which have a more provocative connotation than in English.

Authorities might have also been trying to weaken the brand name, according to bloggers.

The show was hatched in 2004 by Hunan Satellite Television in central China and has proved an absolute phenomenon.

While China has several pop idol-style shows, "Super Girls" is the leader, with the 2006 final attracting an extraordinary audience figure of 400 million viewers, just under a third of China's population.

China's Communist rulers have previously weighed in to impose restrictions on the reality TV hit.

Authorities have expressed disapproval of "vulgar" shows like "Super Girl," and state media had reported the show might not gain approval this year.

"Many (reality TV shows) are low-quality, low-brow programmes only catering to the bottom end of the market," Wang Taihua, head of State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, said in January.

Producers this year plan to whittle down the number of contestants -- more than 100,000 entered last year -- with an Internet audition system aimed also at preventing a crush of applicants from besieging production sites.

Internet applicants must have online access and will be required to send in a 60-second video clip in which they sing unaccompanied.