China is banning foreign cartoons from prime time TV amid efforts to protect China's struggling animation studios.

The ban takes effect on September 1 and applies to the "golden hours" between 5pm and 8pm, the Beijing Youth Daily and other media reported yesterday.

The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television notified TV stations about the new regulation but did not make it public, according to the news reports.

Cartoon programs co-produced by domestic and foreign companies will need approval from SARFT to be shown during the target hours.

The first foreign cartoon aired in China was the Japanese "Astro Boy" series in 1981, which opened the floodgates for many others.

In 2000, SARFT began requiring TV stations to get approval from the administration to show foreign cartoons, and it set quotas on imports. At that time, China's cartoon programs were almost completely dominated by Japanese creations.

In 2004, SARFT issued a regulation requesting that at least 60 percent of cartoon programs aired in a calendar quarter be domestic products. The regulation resulted in a sharp decrease in foreign cartoons on TV.

But incomplete surveys showed that about 80 percent of the Chinese children interviewed said they like foreign cartoons, according to the Southern Metropolis News.

With the new regulations, and the establishment of 15 film and cartoon production bases, the domestic cartoon industry has attracted a large amount of investment. The result was a sharp rise in cartoon programs last year. However, due to the lack of popularity among children, domestic cartoons found it hard to gain an audience during the "golden hours" and had trouble recovering production costs.

The latest regulation aims to save the domestic cartoon industry by "clearing up the sky" with preferential policies, the Southern Metropolis News wrote yesterday in an editorial.

The paper expressed the hope that the quality of domestic cartoons would improve after several years of internal competition. But it went on to say the new move might hurt the interests of children by depriving them of their rights as consumers.

Moreover, creating an environment that would generate better-quality cartoons would be more beneficial than simply protecting the market, it said.

The editorial also argued that, while quotas might be needed to protect competition, an outright ban on foreign cartoons during prime time was "irrational."

"This is a worrying, short-sighted policy and will not solve the fundamental problems in China's cartoon industry," it concluded.

Editor: Yan