Attorney General William Barr is right. It’s well past time that Hollywood and major elements of the U.S. entertainment industry stopped sucking up to Communist China.
In a speech on Thursday, Barr noted that “Hollywood actors, producers, and directors pride themselves on celebrating freedom and the human spirit. And every year at the Academy Awards, Americans are lectured about how this country falls short of Hollywood’s ideals of social justice. But Hollywood now regularly censors its own movies to appease the Chinese Communist Party, the world’s most powerful violator of human rights. This censorship infects not only versions of movies that are released in China but also many that are shown in American theaters to American audiences.”
Barr noted that “the hit movie World War Z depicts a zombie apocalypse caused by a virus. The original version of the film reportedly contained a scene with characters speculating that the virus may have originated in China. (In the novel, patient zero is a boy from Chongqing.) But the studio, Paramount Pictures, reportedly told producers to delete the reference to China in the hope of landing a Chinese distribution deal. The deal never materialized.”
Barr also used another example of the Dr. Strange movie, in which a Tibetan actor was changed to Celtic (regardless of those two identities being on opposite sides of the world) so as to avoid offending China.
The examples are apt. They speak to the absurdity of Hollywood stars lecturing Americans then taking gold from a regime built around Nazi-style eugenics and Soviet-style tyranny.
Yet we should be clear about something. These efforts out of Beijing are designed not simply to eliminate anti-China or nonsympathetic China coverage in U.S. media and entertainment, but to supplant U.S. entertainment with pro-Beijing narratives gradually. The most compelling example of this dynamic will be seen in the upcoming Top Gun movie sequel, Top Gun: Maverick. That movie, I’m confident, will be a good one. But it beggars belief that the studio (and Navy) accepted a change to Tom Cruise’s famous flight jacket. In the original movie, that jacket showed a Taiwan cruise patch. In the new movie, Taiwan has been eliminated. Why? Presumably because Chinese firm Tencent invested in the movie and almost certainly demanded the adaption.
What message does it send that a Hollywood movie about the Navy and American patriotism has been transformed into a movie in which the U.S. Navy must keep China happy? Something made even more ironic by the fact that China is the country which, in the near term future, is increasingly likely to be in a war with the Navy.
The Federalist’s Emily Jashinsky has examined the Hollywood issue in detail. But we should note that these Chinese communist efforts don’t take place in a vacuum. They fit with China’s broader economic and territorial imperialism, a strategy which, playing off Woodrow Wilson’s famous words, Barr rightly noted intends to “overthrow the rule-based international system and to make the world safe for dictatorship.”
Let’s wake up, please.
