Chinese Censors and Hollywood

While we moan about access to Chinese markets and hoops censors make a company jump through to get into it, Hollywood seems to have done well at getting their products into China, even if it cost them in stories they tell.  They are self-censoring their content to get movies into China.  After that, they bow to China’s request for removal of other parts of movies.   On rare occasions, even that doesn’t work.

I saw a piece the other day that had a one-line comment about the movie World War Z not making the cut on movies that were marketed in China.  That was in spite of making a “Chinese version” just for that market.  The Wrap has a whole series of articles about this, but it is mostly read by Hollywood’s finest.  Speculation at the time was that because the outbreak of zombies started in China, the Chinese would not allow that part to be shown.  Simple enough to change where it started, one would think.  It didn’t work out that way.

Further speculation - and there is only speculation on why Chinese censors do anything - was that Brad Pitt, the star of WWZ, had previously done a movie about Tibet and its continued resistance to the Chinese.  This is kind of like saying “Well, you played Snow White’s evil stepmother, so you can’t play here anymore.”  How stupid is that?

But, all those other movies that made it to China were censored and passed.  This is just another way of making sure that information processed by Chinese citizens is consistent with the view the Party has about it’s country.  Taken in little examples, it doesn’t seem like much, but together it is total domination of information.    How nice that Hollywood is so happy to cooperate.