Imagine what literary classics such as George Orwell’s 1984, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago or Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate would have been like had the authors consulted with state censors and bureaucrats before launching their creative efforts.
This is now increasingly happening within the movie industry. Hollywood and other, smaller, bastions of the silver screen are bowing to pressure from China in order to access the world’s second-largest movie market after the US.
As the New York Times reported on Monday, moviemakers seeking access to China’s market have two choices: either avoid subjects that could hurt Beijing’s sensibilities and submit a final product for Beijing’s “approval,” or they co-produce with a Chinese company and do some shooting in China to increase their Chinese appeal.
In both instances, censorship becomes an inevitable component of the final product. So much so, that silence from the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) can be construed as an answer. It has become unacceptable for US fighter aircraft to engage in a dogfight with MiGs on film, which Paramount Pictures experienced with its new 3D version of the classic Top Gun. The remake of Red Dawn is another example.
In another example, the Times has reported that filming in China for Iron Man 3 has been taking place under the “watchful eye” of Chinese bureaucrats (so much for executive producers) who were “invited” to the set and asked to provide “advice” on creative content.
This should serve as a serious warning to Taiwanese filmmakers who increasingly cooperate with China on movie productions.
This has long been in the making. When the Taipei Times sat down with Taiwanese producer Will Tiao (刁毓能) in August 2010 to discuss his movie Formosa Betrayed, he already mentioned the risks of growing Chinese influence in Hollywood. Sadly, producers and movie studios do not seem to be as resilient as Tiao expected, and that’s bad news for all of us.
Director Steven Soderbergh of Traffic fame can use all the euphemisms he wants (he likens the participation of Chinese censors to “people’s interpretations” of one’s story), but the more we sacrifice our ideals, or simply good elements of storytelling, on the altar of the Chinese market, the poorer the entertainment industry will become.
As millionaire moviemakers and publishers yield to the great wall of censorship, those few Chinese artists who dare to speak the truth and who stand on the side of justice will feel all the more abandoned, all because of our inexcusable appetite for capital.
The industry already suffers from a near-terminal dearth of freshness and ideas. By prostituting themselves to the SARFT, the Communist Youth League and the Women’s Federation — not to mention wealthy Chinese who make the “right” productions possible — moviemakers risk forsaking all claims to artistic integrity and being purveyors of truth and justice.
Granted, like literature, not every movie must serve a purpose, and productions can be pure entertainment. However, think of the classics, those movies that stay with us. Very few are pure entertainment. In most cases, true classics become so because they speak to something that lies deep inside us all. That is what gives Hollywood its magic, not computer-generated special effects.
As China’s economy was meant to drive global economic growth this year, its dramatic slowdown is sounding alarm bells across the world, with economists and experts criticizing Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) for his unwillingness or inability to respond to the nation’s myriad mounting crises. The Wall Street Journal reported that investors have been calling on Beijing to take bolder steps to boost output — especially by promoting consumer spending — but Xi has deep-rooted philosophical objections to Western-style consumption-driven growth, seeing it as wasteful and at odds with his goal of making China a world-leading industrial and technological powerhouse, and
For Xi Jinping (習近平) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the military conquest of Taiwan is an absolute requirement for the CCP’s much more fantastic ambition: control over our solar system. Controlling Taiwan will allow the CCP to dominate the First Island Chain and to better neutralize the Philippines, decreasing the threat to the most important People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Strategic Support Force (SSF) space base, the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on Hainan Island. Satellite and manned space launches from the Jiuquan and Xichang Satellite Launch Centers regularly pass close to Taiwan, which is also a very serious threat to the PLA,
During a news conference in Vietnam on Sept. 10, a reporter asked US President Joe Biden about the possibility of China invading Taiwan. Biden replied that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is too busy handling major domestic economic problems to launch an invasion of Taiwan. On Wednesday last week, China’s Taiwan Affairs Office published a document outlining 21 measures to make the Chinese-controlled Fujian Province into a demonstration zone for relations with Taiwan. The planned measures would expand favorable treatment for Taiwanese people and companies, and seek to attract people from Taiwan to buy property and seek employment in Fujian.
More than 100 Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) vessels and aircraft were detected making incursions into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ) on Sunday and Monday, the Ministry of National Defense reported on Monday. The ministry responded to the incursions by calling on China to “immediately stop such destructive unilateral actions,” saying that Beijing’s actions could “easily lead to a sharp escalation in tensions and worsen regional security.” Su Tzu-yun (蘇紫雲), a research fellow at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, said that the unusually high number of incursions over such a short time was likely Beijing’s response to efforts
RSS