Two Songbirds Get Sacked From China’s New Year’s Gala, a Sign Their Powerful, Rumored Lovers Will Be Taken Down

China’s state-run media emphasized the absence from the CCTV New Year Gala this year of two female celebrity performers notorious for rumored affairs with high-ranking communist officials.

Delegate Song Zuying (C) Chinese singer walks out of the opening session of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference held at the Great Hall of the People on March 3, 2014, in Beijing, China. Chinese media said Song will be absent from the 2015 Chinese New Year Gala. Lintao Zhang/Getty Images

Two longtime celebrity performers will not make the biggest show of the year in China, perhaps because they were the bedfellows of officials who are on the outs with the current regime.

The Chinese New Year Gala reaches an estimated 700 million viewers on state-run TV. Missing from the cultural and propaganda extravaganza will be folk singer Song Zuying, who since 1990 has appeared in every New Year Gala—24 years straight, and soloist Tan Jing, known as the “Voice of Harmony.”

General director of the Gala, Ha Wen, stated that “performers with moral stains and blemishes” would not be selected for the program, as reported by the Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily on Feb. 17.

Song Zuying owed her 24-year-long tenure with the show to Jiang Zemin's direct political patronage.