Hollywood is importing Chinese censorship to the United States – Washington Examiner

Hollywood likes to hold itself out as a progressive pioneer of social justice, but a new report highlights how the desire to get films into the Chinese market leads major film studios to violate their own social justice dogma. In fact, it often leads them to import the values of the Chinese Communist Party the organization with the highest body count in human history.

The report by PEN America, a nonprofit organization that promotes free expression in literature, examines a collection of films that bowed to Chinese censorship in order to get access to the Chinese movie market. China allows 34 foreign films to be released in the country each year, and in 2018, quarterly revenue from China surpassed the United States for the first time. Before the pandemic, it was projected that revenue from China in 2023 would reach $15.5 billion.

Some Chinese censorship is minor, propaganda that can only be caught by alert viewers. Paramount cut the Taiwanese flag from Tom Cruises jacket for the Top Gun sequel, while the DreamWorks film Abominable (a collaboration with Chinas Pearl Studio) featured the nine-dash line, a propaganda map asserting Chinas control of the South China Sea.

Hollywood studios will often run afoul of the tenets of social justice they often push in the U.S. Marvel notably whitewashed a major Tibetan character in Doctor Strange to avoid offending the Chinese government. Studios ranging from Warner Brothers to Paramount to Twentieth Century Fox have either removed scenes of same-sex kissing from films or had them removed by China when the films aired. A complaint from a religious group in the U.S., on the other hand, would only draw mockery.

The most troubling takeaway from the report is not that individual scenes are being censored or self-censored but that studios have decided to base major film decisions on China, sometimes even unprompted. Marvel infamously brought in Chinese regulators during the filming of Iron Man 3 to ensure the movie stayed inbounds and added extra scenes to the Chinese version of the film showing Chinese doctors saving Iron Mans life.

The days of Hollywood backing human rights in its work have disappeared. The 1997 film Seven Years in Tibet, portraying Chinas 1950 invasion of Tibet, led to the blacklisting of director Jean-Jacques Annaud until his groveling apology 12 years later. Film star Brad Pitt was also penalized for the movie, which likely helped bar World War Z from a Chinese release.

Change is not a lost cause. The industrys biggest stars have the power to push for it, as when Quentin Tarantino refused to sign off on a re-cut of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to appease Chinese censors. But if Hollywoods other influential voices are unwilling to even stand up for their own creative freedom, why would they take a stand on behalf of the human rights of people they will never even meet?

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Hollywood is importing Chinese censorship to the United States - Washington Examiner