Usually, they only censor the explicit content. But this is the first time that AI tools were used to directly alter the content of the original film.
By the way, the film has been withdrawn from a wide release in China after receiving too many complaints.
ridiculous chinese censorship
*looks inside* *Private company (the producers of the movie in fact) makes decision to do extremely stupid and unnecessary thing for Chinese localisation*
*Media blames Chinese Government for thing the Chinese Government didn’t ask for*
EDIT: Is this even real? I am suspicious - https://hexbear.net/comment/6521304
EDIT2: Yeah it’s real but the blame still isn’t China itself.
Looks like even OP is doing this
This isn’t the first time. There’s been a long running myth in the videogame industry that you’re not allowed to have skeletons in videogames in China. This isn’t true of course, but it hasn’t stopped western companies changing their games for the Chinese region by removing the skeletons and replacing them with something else.
This is caused by some dumbass liberal media producers in australia believing the propaganda that China is anti-lgbt and disallows this and making this adjustment based on that belief. It’s caused by western ignorance and “better be safe than sorry” rather than anything the government actually wants.
This is false. The film in question is a buyout/acquisition film, meaning that the importing distributor pays a lump sum for the licensing rights and the original producer does not participate in the revenue earning from Chinese cinematic release, so the purchaser of film rights has more liberty to alter the content.
The other type of film is called revenue-sharing film - and because the producers retain the film rights, this would require the Chinese censorship to list out their demands for the producers to remove specific parts of the film.
Ok but that’s still a private company.
Depends on your perspective. All import films are exclusively distributed by China Film Group (中影) and Huaxia Film Distribution Co (华影). Both are SOEs (China Film is state-owned, Huaxia is state-owned joint-stock enterprise) but are fairly autonomous. This film, Together, was licensed by China Film Group.’
Again I encourage you to read the link above (with machine translation) to understand the topic in more detail because a lot of what you’re writing is misinformation.
Again I encourage you to read the link above (with machine translation) to understand the topic in more detail
I did. The link is just a bunch of quotes of random things Chinese people are saying on social media (with no actual links to where they said them so I can’t source anything or even trust that they’re real). What exactly are you suggesting I take from a bunch of random people online complaining that the change happened? Why does a bunch of random Chinese social media posts prove what I have said is misinformation?
What exactly have I even said that is misinformation anyway? You know SOEs act independently of the state, or at least you should.
Your info isn’t even correct anyway so why are you accusing me of misinformation? You’re claiming that this film was actually released in this state. It was not released. It was due to be released on the 19th of September and they cancelled it on the 18th of September before the national release.
This is version of the film has in actual fact not been released.
I don’t know where the original article you’re linking to is getting its information from. Either it’s some private screening, a leak, or it’s totally and completely bullshit. The quality of the evidence makes me suspicious, some weird low quality photograph of a screen, maybe a theatre, is being compared to the western version with a photograph of it on a literal CRT? Who the fuck is using a CRT to watch a 2025 movie? The more I look at it the more questions I have about it. The fact nobody is citing any real sources in absolutely anything is pissing me off.
I’m getting more and more suspicious about whether this is even real. China Digital Times is based in Berkeley, CA. Who owns this shit?
Edit: From the wiki for this site’s owner:
The website was started by Xiao Qiang of University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism in fall 2003. Xiao has asserted that Chinese internet users are using digital tools to create new autonomous forms of political expression and dissent, “changing the rules of the game between state and society”.[4]
According to Freedom House, researchers at China Digital Times have reportedly identified over 800 filtered terms, including “Cultural Revolution” and “propaganda department”.[5] The types of words, phrases and web addresses censored by the government include names of Chinese high-level leadership; protest and dissident movements; politically sensitive events, places and people; and foreign websites and organizations blocked at network level, along with pornography and other content.[6]
This site is owned by a Chinese dissident working in a US university to make anti China shit.EDITEDIT: AND IT’S BEEN FUNDED BY NED LMAOOOOOOOOO
MULTIEDIT: I’m satisfied that the ai edit is real now.
Again, it’s all over the social media, especially on xiaohongshu (social media platform) and zhihu (Chinese quora) that are extremely lib coded. They are the ones who care most about the LGBT stuff.
The page I posted is exactly catered for crowds like this. However, if you don’t like the source, feel free to take it from Sohu which posts articles from users. This is as mainstream as you can get.
Also, the film has been released in selected cinemas in 20 cities. This is how people have already watched it and reported on social media. No offense but you seriously are misrepresenting a lot of stuff here. As I said in the original post, it is being withdrawn from a wide release due to complaints.
This is starting to feel like wrecker shit. Is it just me?
I’m starting to get a little suspicious of Xiaohongshu at this point, they seem to be so determined to prove that China isn’t some utopia that they even go all in on western style anti-China propaganda efforts. If their goal is to get people to actually understand China properly, they’re doing a terrible job with posts titled like this.
How is this anti-China propaganda? This is openly discussed on Chinese social media. The only reason I post is because Hexbear has a large queer community who care about this stuff.
The title is misleading and completely ignores the focus: that this is a ridiculous bit of censorship by a company, not “evil China” censoring things because they are evil. This is “Rainbow-washing” type of propaganda, the same we saw when Israel attacked Iran, or hell, when they attack Palestine, trying to get people with progressive politics to hate them and refuse to even consider critical support for them on the grounds of not passing a purity test. That may not be how you intended it, but that is how it has come across to me, the title you used is virtually identical to western propaganda against China, though they tend to use words like “Insidious” or “Authoritarian” not “Ridiculous”.
deleted by creator
The title is NOT misleading lol. This is literally being discussed on the social media. Here is a Zhihu thread (think Chinese quora, one of the most popular social media platforms, though very much lib coded) with hundreds of discussion comments.
It appears that it is you who have fallen for Western anti-China propaganda that somehow all Chinese people are mindless drones that support 100% the government does.
No, we discuss and complain about things on social media all the time lol. You just have to be careful with the key phrases you’re using.
What they appear to be saying, which you aren’t addressing in this reply, is that this is the fault of a Chinese company and not the CPC directly, while the headline clearly implies that it’s the fault of the CPC in a more direct sense, like they ordered this.
The censorship itself is a process.
If the semantic argument here is that the censorship bureau doesn’t do all the cutting by itself, then technically the government doesn’t censor anything at all. The government simply tells you what is and not acceptable. The party that submits the product for licensing and approval has to do all the alterations.
As I mentioned, there are only two film companies that are allowed to handle imported films, and have done so for at least two decades importing hundreds of foreign films over the years. So these people know what they’re doing. The ridiculous part here is how they thought it would be a good idea to buy the film distribution rights and use AI tool to alter the contents to get around the issue. People aren’t buying it this time lol.
They have trot politics its lowkey annoying. I was talking to a trot recently who started talking about how china is oppressing the global south by exporting commodities and everything started to click lmao
How do I have trot politics? Trots would hate Mao and Deng. I am fully supportive of Mao and Deng policies as you can freely read through my comment history.
I am seriously curious how, after posting for years on this website, people still misrepresent my politics!
I honestly didn’t realize you liked Deng, though I guess it makes sense because you take such pains to divide Reform and Opening Up from the subsequent periods that you mostly talk about, where you (rightly) ridicule the CPC for corrupt and bourgeois-bureaucratic elements. Is there any chance you could link to a place where you talk about why Deng’s policies were good?
You can tell from my comments that I almost never criticized anything from 1976 to 1994, with the exception that Deng screwed up the price reform in 1988 (a legitimate L), which, together with the June 4th (Tiananmen incident) in 1989, forced him into semi-retirement, though his influence remained vast even in retirement. Otherwise I have always acknowledged his contributions as significant.
The watershed moment was the 1994 Tax Sharing Reform, which forced local/municipal governments to seek for alternative (non-tax) sources of income to finance their own operations. This led the Northeast heavy industrial provinces to mass privatize their SOEs, and the ensuing unemployment wave that caused an economic crisis in 1995-6. Two major policy changes happened afterwards: Zhu Rongji ended the welfare housing distribution policy (government giving free housing to employees) in 1998 to unleash land capital to save the economy, and China joining the WTO in 2001 to reverse the unemployment trend.
Western leftist who has only seen Trotskism, seeing a second leftist ideology: “Getting a lot of 'Trotskist
’ vibes from this…”Ive met trots that like deng. Im just saying that complaining about china to random people on the internet instead of just doing somethig to fix it if ur chinese is liberal behavior. I dont think ur a bad person but its a tendency of a petty bourgeois class outlook
lol, the only reasons I am posting here are to 1) practice my English and 2) provide some educational value stuff to people who are interested in learning about China. You can choose to ignore my posts if you don’t like to learn about this kind of things, which is completely fair.
