Posted on 08/06/2020 1:08:52 PM PDT by Kaslin
American studios are not only cutting content that displeases the CCP, but actively inserting propaganda at the behest of the Chinese government.
Producers, writers, and financiers inside Hollywood explained to PEN America just how far the industry goes to please the Chinese Communist Party, in an eye-opening report released Wednesday.
“Most people do not burn China, because there’s an expectation of ‘I’ll never work again,'” one producer told PEN America.
“You consult with Chinese experts and media consultants, you think about whether something is going to be perceived as criticism,” another producer added. “You worry about inadvertently crossing some line.”
Chinese audiences are a massively lucrative market for American filmmakers, with China on track to pass the U.S. as the largest movie market. The Hollywood Reporter noted that American movies made over $2.5 billion in China last year.
But selling movie tickets in China comes at a price, as the Chinese government has complete control over what movies make it to their massive audience. The Chinese Communist Party’s Central Propaganda Department controls media oversight.
I Helped Hollywood Get Closer To China And I Regret It
“The Chinese government imposes a strict pre-publication review system for all films, and retains the right to ban any film that does not comply from being shown in theaters—or even from streaming online—within the country,” PEN America noted in their report.
It also controls a movie’s release date, how long a movie will play, and what theaters will show it. Beijing uses a quota system to regulate how many non-Chinese movies make it into China at all. These and other regulations also incentivize Hollywood studios to make movies through joint productions with Chinese producers, which is financially lucrative but brings production even more closely under the supervision of the communist government.
Additionally, China passed the Film Industry Promotion Law in 2016 prohibiting movies that, among other things, harm “national dignity, honor or interests,” undermine “social stability,” or belittle “exceptional ethnic cultural traditions.” This is also the kind of language the CCP uses to prosecute and imprison its people for political speech.
PEN America cites countless examples of Hollywood studios editing out scenes that might displease the CCP.
In “Mission: Impossible III,” Chinese censors successfully pressured Hollywood to cut a scene where a “clothesline hanging from a Shanghai apartment airing tattered underwear” was visible. In 2015, “Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation” received funding from the China Movie Channel, which is owned by the Chinese government.
In the Bond flick “Casino Royale,” Judy Dench had to change a line about missing the Cold War to a general remark about missing the “old times.” Any scenes that normalize or promote same-sex attraction are routinely censored as well.
Quentin Tarantino made headlines in 2019 for refusing to change the content of one of his movies to appease the CCP.
It’s also not just censorship of the Chinese releases of Hollywood movies. Pressure from China also often results in the final global releases — the ones that end up in front of American viewers and other international audiences — being censored.
Sony cut a scene of “aliens bringing down the Great Wall” from its 2015 movie “Pixels” for fear of angering Chinese censors. Leaked emails between Sony executives revealed that they changed the global version, not just the one released in China, to try and cover up their appeasement of the Chinese government. “If we only change the China version, we set ourselves up for the press to call us out for this when bloggers invariably compare the versions and realize we changed the China setting just to pacify that market,” one email said.
Other emails showed concerns over the movie “Captain Phillips,” which portrays the U.S. military rescuing one man from Somali pirates. “China would never do the same and in no way would want to promote this idea,” wrote Sony’s president of worldwide distribution, Rory Bruer, in 2013.
In “RoboCop” in 2014, Sony also made changes to minimize the Chinese government’s ties to an American corporation in the movie.
Sony also digitally changed Chinese soldiers to North Korean ones in the 2012 remake of “Red Dawn,” a movie about American high school students fighting against an invading army. The original 1984 movie took place during the Cold War with Soviet soldiers; the remake featured the Chinese military until Sony switched it to North Korea. The studio also ditched a backstory explaining that the Chinese military invaded the U.S. for failing its national debt payments.
Marvel Studios even whitewashed a character in “Dr. Strange” in 2016 to avoid acknowledging the existence of Tibet. The character, played by Tilda Swinton, was switched from Tibetan to Celtic. “If you acknowledge that Tibet is a place…you risk [the Chinese government saying] ‘We’re not going to show your movie,'” admitted the movie’s writer, C. Robert Cargill.
In the trailer for the “Top Gun” sequel, now due for release in 2021, Paramount quietly removed the Taiwanese flag on the leather flight jacket worn by Tom Cruise’s character.
Another Paramount movie, “World War Z,” was changed to avoid angering China in 2013. A conversation in which several characters speculate that a zombie-apocalypse-causing virus originated in China (a plot point taken from the book on which the movie was based) was altered to try and secure a movie release in China, which ultimately never happened. The book’s author later commented, after the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in China, that he’d specifically chosen China as the origin of the fictitious viral outbreak “because it’s not enough to have a large population and a rapid transportation network, so the virus can spread like wildfire. You also need a government that is willing to suppress the truth.”
When actress Crystal Liu of Disney’s live-action “Mulan” remake expressed her support for the Chinese police that are imprisoning pro-democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong, Disney never reprimanded her or even spoke publicly on the issue.
Other topics that are generally disapproved by the CCP include the protests in Tiananmen Square and Hong Kong, questions of the CCP’s territorial sovereignty in the South China Sea and elsewhere, and even time travel. Stories about the supernatural can also set off alarms. As the restrictions on time travel and ghost stories demonstrate, it’s not simply several-second scenes that the CCP frowns upon; it can be whole genres.
It’s also not just about cutting content that angers the CCP. American studios are actively adding content that pushes Chinese state propaganda, in return for favorable treatment by the Chinese government.
In “just three of many examples,” PEN American notes, “the films 2012, Columbia Pictures’ 2009 disaster film by Roland Emmerich, the 2013 Warner Brothers’ film ‘Gravity,’ by director Alfonso Cuarón, and ‘Arrival,’ the 2016 alien invasion film from Paramount, all predicate their happy endings on Chinese forces coming to the rescue.” It’s also “commonly accepted,” they note, that future movie villains won’t be Chinese.
In “Iron Man 3,” Marvel even added a scene specifically for Chinese audiences to please the CCP, which show Chinese doctors trying “frantically” to save the protagonist’s life. Chinese “regulators” were also brought on set for their advice on the movie, production sources told the New York Times. The Times called this self-censorship “middle of the road.”
Paramount’s 2014 movie “Transformers: Age of Extinction,” produced jointly with Chinese state media, was so obviously propagandized that a Variety review called it “a splendidly patriotic film, if you happen to be Chinese.”
And in the 2012 Bruce Willis movie “Looper,” after a Chinese agency funded almost half of the movie’s budget, scenes in Paris were switched to Shanghai, and a line was added from one character to another: “I’m from the future. You should go to China.”
In Gravity Pictures’ shark flick, “The Meg,” Hawaii was switched to China and scientists who were Japanese in the original book suddenly became Chinese.
And the Dreamworks animated movie “Abominable” shows a map that reflects Chinese claims to own the South China Sea, despite international jurisprudence finding against the Chinese government’s territorial claims.
“The big story is not what’s getting changed, but what is not ever even getting greenlit,” says Michael Berry, director of UCLA’s Center for Chinese Studies.
PEN America also noted that plenty of the censorship is self-imposed, even before the Chinese authorities have a chance to weigh in. “If you come up with a project that is actively critical…[you’re afraid] you or your company will actively be blacklisted, and they will interfere with your current or future project,” a Hollywood producer told PEN America. “That’s absolutely in the back of our minds.”
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has taken an increasingly tough stance on China, and has blasted Hollywood for “kowtowing” to the communist country’s government.
“This is real,” a Hollywood writer told PEN America. “This is affecting not just what Chinese audiences see, but what Americans get to watch.”
CHYnawood
We’ll Hollywood, you made your bed. If you want out, then you gotta make a choice about money or free speech and art.
Hollywood and Crap are interchangeable
Bagpipes is right on it ™
Commiewood
“ Any scenes that normalize or promote same-sex attraction are routinely censored as well.”
We used to censor sexual immorality as well. Now US speed porn and homosexual propaganda worldwide.
“ If you want out, then you gotta make a choice about money or free speech and art.“
For Hollywood, “free speech” means filming naked people, sexual intercourse, and homosexual propaganda. It wasn’t so long ago that such fare wasn’t allowed on American film screens. Apparently the Chinese still don’t allow it. Remind me why I’m supposed to denounce China for maintaining standards that used to be common in this country up until the mid/late 60s?
its why i cant watch 99% of what comes out of there, even before knowing this new censorship and appeasement of the chinese
on top of the reasons i wouldn’t watch the movies anyway
i guess south park isn’t being shown in china !
“ Bagpipes is right on it ™”
So bagpip s is supposed to force China to accept the porn scenes from America’s unedited films? Is that kind of like the West once forced China to but opium?
LOL. So, no more gay shit in muh movies? Thanks, China!
its why i cant watch 99% of what comes out of there, even before knowing this new censorship and appeasement of the chonest
The article says part of the “censorship” is against homo eroticism. US used to censor homosexual propaganda in the movies as well. Before we got “woke” in the sixties
Destruction of self, destruction of family continues apace. PSYOPS. It works until it doesn’t.
hom crap in the movies is never integral to the story and either way, i won’t watch that garbage
they censor it not because they are Christians morally objecting to it, its because for whatever reasons, the chinese communist has decided it doesn’t work for the party or china, and that’s the extent of the reasoning required
if homo worked for the communists they would subsidize and encourage it and re-educate people to celebrate it
I’m guessing that I would not be watching a remake of the Bugs Bunny versus Michael Jordan with LeBron James replacing MJ. That would be deep into the CCP Dip!
Hollywood is full of prostitutes in more than one way. The filth will prostrate themselves to anyone for a buck.
This is all part of the elites desire to institute a global government.
They are idiots, because they think bringing China up and the U.S. down will somehow bring about a "better" global government, where they will be in the elite.
It is also because the Western elites do not want *any* restraint on any sexual activity.
they censor it not because they are Christians morally objecting to it
They censor it for the same reason every functioning society has always censored it - it undermines society
I am not going to hate the Chinese government for censoring homosexual propaganda. It’s a sign of the rot in our society - including in the “conservative” movement - that I’m expected to condemn China for censoring the exact kind of sex fare that we used to censor before the 60s revolution
I don’t understand why they don’t just do alternate versions of some scenes for a Chinese edit?
. The filth will prostrate themselves to anyone for a buck.
You mean they’ll edit out the porn and homo propaganda, in order to make money in China - while continuing to spew that stuff at our kids here at home? China is wrong and bad in many ways, but not in forbidding the kind of sex and homo stuff in movies that wasn’t allowed in the US prior to about 1968
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