amw

Weekend long read: censorship, Hollywood and Uncle Roger

Jan 15, 2021 11:03

The latest cancel culture drama was around Malaysian stand-up comic Nigel Ng, better known as his YouTube character Uncle Roger ( Read more... )

china, news, politics

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Comments 18

geminiwench January 15 2021, 19:49:17 UTC
This is an AMAZING post ( ... )

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amw January 15 2021, 21:57:15 UTC
There is so much ideological battle that goes on inside the Chinese diaspora, it is difficult to grasp ( ... )

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geminiwench January 16 2021, 03:24:54 UTC
I really appreciate getting your perspective of what you see as an outsider, with a lot of experience inside ( ... )

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amw January 15 2021, 23:59:56 UTC
This is a really great video, and i agree with pretty much all of it. I especially like the honesty of Hedges in holding both the media and the Democrats accountable for failing to take Trump to task from the very beginning - they benefited just as much from Trump being an outrageous public figure as the Republicans did! They all milked him as long as they could for their own money and power. If Trump had been replaced with Pence early on, the Democratic nominee could've had a much harder job of winning in 2020. Politics is so cynical ( ... )

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nahele_101 January 15 2021, 20:48:02 UTC
The changing of movie characters, portrayals, and themes in Hollywood to appease China is definitely not well known, but when someone thinks about access to their markets, you can see why Hollywood changes things to "harmonize" with the image CCP wants. It's garbage, but yah, definitely well known. The Falun Gong thing is odd, but so is the CCP's reaction to it. I've been aware of this crap for quite awhile, but I also tend to read a lot about geopolitics, so that is probably why.

Good link you provided! Major companies in the U.S bend to the CCP so they can make money, and in turn make the average citizen's life less interesting, less informed, and less likely to stand up for themselves.

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amw January 15 2021, 21:16:38 UTC
Yeah, the really frustrating thing is that Hollywood is not adjusting the content to what the Chinese market wants, it's adjusting to the content the CCP wants the Chinese market to be exposed to. That's the insidiousness of having the party at the center of everything - the Chinese people never really get a say in their own destiny, it's always filtered through whatever the party wants ( ... )

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benicek January 16 2021, 15:23:26 UTC
Have you seen the film 'Looper'? Great sci-fi story but very obvious pro-China messages pop up multiple times.

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nahele_101 January 16 2021, 21:11:35 UTC
Great movie! I'll rewatch it for the China is great!!! messages though! I love Sci-Fi.

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belleweather January 16 2021, 04:03:16 UTC
A big argument here seems to be that because of censorship people will stop having ideas that are contrary to what the party wants and that creative works that don't toe the line won't get made -- or won't get big audiences. But just looking at the sorts of dramas and light novels that I've started to read, I'm not sure that's completely true. There does seem to be a space for limited discourse that is outside of Chinese censorship, or at least how it's applied to visual media. It's not aggressively political (and maybe in some ways buys into contemporary political ideals as much as it subverts them) but it's there and there is definitely a demand for it ( ... )

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amw January 16 2021, 19:58:15 UTC
One of the most interesting things i got from that PEN report is that the self-censorship is perhaps worse in Hollywood than it is in the domestic industry, because of the foreign film quota! So Hollywood is competing with itself in trying to create the most CCP-friendly content in order to get that coveted foreign film slot, whereas the domestic film industry doesn't need to push as hard, since as long as they stay away from taboo topics they should be fine ( ... )

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