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PEN America Calls for Flagging US Films Piggybacked by Chinese Propagandists

Almost every six months, Americans are reminded once again of how communist China influences their popular culture. In Top Gun: Maverick, for example, the flag of the Republic of China on Tom Cruise’s jacket is made to disappear. But James Tager, author of a recent report on China’s cultural power published by the New York-based literary society PEN America, notes that Americans are apt to put behind China’s impact on the US cinema as irritated as they were at first.

In his report Made in Hollywood, Censored by Beijing, Tager points out that Beijing’s censorship works differently from that in the US, where sensitive material is simply cut out at the start of the editing process after the shooting is completed. With Chinese-style censorship, changes are, frustratingly, often not made clear at the outset and take place in the middle of the shooting. For the most part, though, it does not go as far as it did in MGM’s 2012 film Red Dawn, where digital technology had to be employed to change the Chinese villain into a North Korean in post-production.

But Tager adds that over time, writers and producers will start to engage in self-censorship. Seeing its futility, they will refrain from generating ideas, stories, or characters that break the rules. It is not easy to produce and distribute a film in Hollywood without taking into account the foreign market. Given also the plight the Wuhan virus pandemic has left the US in, the Chinese audience is increasingly important to American studios.

With a quota in place for foreign films distributed in China, competition among them is fierce. The last thing a studio wants is a potential mistake that leads to its production’s being kept out of release in China. It is unthinkable nowadays that a major studio would make a film like the 1997 thriller Red Corner, where a businessman, played by Richard Gere, is framed for murder by the Chinese Communist Party—let alone a film about pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong or China’s anti-Uyghur concentration camps. No studio would dare to take such a risk in face of the 1.4 billion Chinese consumers. It would be commercial suicide.

And not only does this shift prevents Chinese consumers from getting in touch with innovative ideas, but it also allows for a dictatorship to piggyback its propaganda onto American films. Take as an example the 2012 film Looper. Abe, the future leader of the killers played by Jeff Daniels, says to a younger killer, “I’m from the future; you should go to China.” The average viewer will not realize that this is propaganda, much less that it is a major victory for the Chinese government in its effort to increase its authority and elevate China’s status.

In view of this, Tager suggests putting a permanent label at the beginning of all films funded and, in turn, censored by China. It will serve as a warning that counteracts the brainwashing effect the film has on the audience—the same way the Motion Picture Association’s (MPA) rating, shown before every film, warns the audience of the film’s adult content and smoking scenes.

Source: Apple Daily #Aug29

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