Americans are rightly proud of our traditions of free speech and free artistic expression. Hollywood has made full use of these traditions, so much so that political diatribes are now a staple feature of the Oscars.
But when it comes to China, Hollywood has voluntarily self-censored to appease a regime known for its brutal repression of all the freedoms that artists, writers, and filmmakers supposedly cherish most.
Few modern examples of the abuse of human rights rival those being perpetrated on a vast scale by the Chinese regime. For example, it is now being reported that China’s prison camps for Muslims may be the largest since the Holocaust, holding as many as 1 million prisoners. But Hollywood has not produced a single film on Chinese human rights atrocities in decades.
Why such utter silence from an industry whose social activism is a domestic cliche? Since China is the second largest movie-going country in the world, American filmmakers desperately want their films to be approved for Chinese distribution. As a result, not a single American movie shown in China has escaped review by censors. In fact, China has also shrewdly begun to invest in American movies to further control their content, not only in China but in the United States as well.
In Pixels, a film where aliens attack Earth as arcade game characters, a scene featuring the destruction of the Great Wall was cut as insufficiently deferential to China. Comparable edits have been made in dozens of other American movies when studios were told such scenes could show destruction in Hong Kong but not Mainland China. Similarly, realistic portrayals of pollution in Chinese urban areas have been uniformly axed.
Even James Bond could not escape a direct edit in Skyfall. In the Chinese version, one of the changes made was to remove a scene where Bond kills a Chinese security guard.
The second iteration of Red Dawn — the remake of a sophomoric film about teenagers saving their hometown from a Communist invasion — was originally shot with the Chinese as the antagonists, in place of the Russians from the 1984 version. But in order to appease Chinese censors, all of the flags and uniforms were changed to North Korean in post-production, costing the filmmakers over $1 million.
Documentaries like Tiananmen Square are less likely to be made today because of their horrifying, yet accurate, portrayal of the Chinese government, which ordered its soldiers to fire on peaceful student protesters. The same applies to films and documentaries that touch upon the brutal repression in Tibet, the Cultural Revolution, and other defining episodes in Chinese history that do not fit the Communist Party’s official mythology.
Wouldn’t it be powerful to see a movie about the struggles of Chinese artists, writers, and (yes) even filmmakers facing the monumental censorship machine of Communist China? For all their bravado in front of captive American audiences, Hollywood shows its true colors by groveling voluntarily at the feet of the master censors in Beijing.
Do we really want another country to dictate to us what stories we can or cannot tell, particularly one whose regime is so openly hostile to democracy and freedom? The next time you watch a self-righteous Oscar diatribe, consider the response of the Hollywood establishment to world’s largest totalitarian state. Their collective silence is deafening.
Matthew Daniels is the Chair of Law and Human Rights at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C., and the author of the new book Human Liberty 2.0.
