Something that might be comparably shocking is the extent to which Chinese investors and government representatives influence the content of Hollywood movies that depict or refer to China. There were some news reports about this in the last couple of years; I sat next to a Hollywood studio executive on a flight last month and (rather than arguing about copyright policy) commiserated about this issue. He confirmed that there are organized systems in place with representatives sent to monitor film content to ensure Chinese market access and avoid upsetting investors.
This has been reported quite a bit for several years; see, e.g.,
That third link is fascinating - not just for he insights into how Chinese censors indirectly guide producers, but also for the lack of ironic detachment and self-awareness shown by the American analysts, eg
Red Dawn, a remake of a 1980s action movie about a Soviet invasion of the United States, was originally shot
featuring China as the antagonist invading the United States. According to Mr. Shiao, however, the Chinese are
“not interested in their country being perceived as a violent military threat to the lives of average Americans.”
and
A 'Captain Phillips' executive identified the tone of the film as a source of discomfort for censors, particularly
“the big Military machine of the U.S. saving one U.S. citizen. China would never do the same and in no way would
want to promote this idea.”
While I think censorship an unwise and ultimately self-defeating policy, and also agree with the basic premise that a good many of the rules are just dressed up protectionism, I can't really blame China for declining to import overt propaganda. China makes lots of propagandistic films, but the propaganda is mainly about what China should be like. It'll be some time before they produce an overtly anti-American film like Brother 2 or Valley of the Wolves (as opposed to striaght-up propaganda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_8lSjcoSW8) and I doubt whether it would be well-received here if they did.
A 'Captain Phillips' executive identified the tone of the film as a source of discomfort for censors, particularly “the big Military machine of the U.S. saving one U.S. citizen. China would never do the same and in no way would want to promote this idea.”
I was watching Argo on my Chinese IPTV streaming service in Shenzhen with my Chinese roommate and my roommate was blown away by the idea that the movie was based on a true story. He said that the Chinese government would never take such extreme steps to rescue its citizens from any such situation. I never really thought about his comment and his shock (it was a lot of shock) until reading this just now. Wow, interesting.
Those six were no ordinary citizens, they were diplomats.
Argo is a deeply troubling film. From the one-dimensionality of the Iranians to the complete lack of historical context ignoring prior US meddling and interfering in internal Iranian affairs[1]. The involvement of the CIA in the production[2]. The historical inaccuracies of the film[3]. The timing of the release of the film given Iranian-Western relations over its nuclear program.
For me Argo is basically unwatchable US patriotic screen-fodder bordering on propaganda.
“Argo and Zero Dark Thirty are only the latest film productions the CIA has influenced in the 15 years since the Agency opened its official liaison office to Hollywood […]”
Can you tell me/us a little about that youtube link? I looked at it and it's all in chinese/mandarin so can't really understand much. A small skip forward showed Gorbatjev and Yeltsin in some kind of parlamentiary setting and the audience laughing loudly. I'm very curious now.
Oh sorry! It's a Chinese propaganda 'documentary' put out by the Defense Ministry of the PRC. I did look for a subtitled/captioned version but no luck, though you can find rough transcripts on other pages.
Essentially it extrapolates from an (apparently genuine) GIA document produced during the 1990s, laying out a rough 'recipe' for turning a country towards western democracy by cultural, institutional, and political influence (or subversion, depending on your point of view) - essentially the 'soft power' approach of American diplomacy, backed up by the 90s-era conviction that we'd entered the 'end of history' following the fall of the USSR and that it was only a matter of time before every country switched to democracy and free markets because That's What Works. So this film is 50% a review of history from the Chinese and communist perspectives (worth remembering that Chinese history goes back ~5000 years so they see Marxism as a political technology rather than an identity), and 50% a how-to guide on spotting insidious Western cultural viruses.
Amusingly enough some of their complaints overlap with the complaints of western conservatives about 'cultural Marxism' which alleges that the entertainment industry is bent on unmaking national social consenses and replacing them with one world globalist tyranny. I wouldn't be surprised to find some films are considered objectionable by both communists and conservatives.
I'm not a fan of this kind of government influence in filmmaking, but so long as the Chinese are at it maybe they could turn their attention to Hollywood's propensity to depict Asian males as undesirable emasculated nerds and Asian females as fetishized objects.
Likewise, when japan does live action versions of their anime, they are unable to find Caucasian actors to fill roles that are obviously Caucasian. Tamaki Suoh in Ouran Host Club obviously has blonde hair and blue eyes in the anime, but in the live action becomes completely Japanese! Perhaps they just couldn't find an actor that looked the role?
Japan is 98% Japanese - that comparison doesn't even make sense.
>Perhaps they just couldn't find an actor that looked the role?
Of course they could, but the problem is it seems as if they wouldn't dare try. They stopped looking after "the one hot female lead we put in every sci-fi movie now."
Yes they are. Yet they present a diverse universe of characters whose ethnicities are clearly not Japanese or are very ambiguous.
Note that for this reason, there was no controversy about the casting of the GIS protagonist in Japan itself. The vocal critics have all been Asian Americans. But that doesn't really say much, as this movie is being judged as an American one rather than a Japanese one; the lack of Asian American actors getting roles like these bothers me also.
>Note that for this reason, there was no controversy about the casting of the GIS protagonist in Japan itself. The vocal critics have all been Asian Americans.
Because Asian Americans are more aware of the lack of diversity in roles for Asians in American movies. Japanese people would have no idea about that because where they live, every hero on every screen in every Japanese movie is Japanese.
I'm well aware of the style in anime to present characters as "stateless", and why it's done, but that isn't the problem. Asian actors appearing to not be on equal footing with Caucasian and African American actors when it comes to the roles they're allowed to portray is the problem.
I'm sick of seeing the same few faces in everything.
The standard excuse is there are no Japanese actors with good enough English skills. Why they can't draw from the Nisei population in Hawaii and the west coast is still baffling.
Are they? Anime characters do not seem to be bound by typical (or even possible) hair and eye colours. Couldn't such characters be, well, ethnic Japanese people who happen to have an unusual hair colour? That seems to be the general assumption.
Their ethnicities are often explicitly specified (Tameki has a French mother). Japan is also not that homogenous. Sometimes the ethnicities are left ambiguous, in which case it could be hair/eye coloring.
In ghost in the shell, the protagonist is a robot or cyborg, ethnicity isn't fixed.
> And yet every time Hollywood adapts a Japanese property they seem to be unable to find any Asian actors in California to portray any Major roles.
Hollywood wants major established Hollywood names that are perceived as major draws in and of themselves in major roles on any major projects. Insofar as the output of that process has apparent racial bias (and it does, significantly) it's largely an effect of the fact that the process by which one becomes an established Hollywood name with big perceived drawing power involves many, many sources of bias.
I don't watch many major movie releases anymore so I could well be out of the loop and misinformed. If Hollywood is truly getting better at not using the kinds of ethnic, racial, and gender tropes that make for cheap laughs and storytelling then that is very good news to me.
American investors and government influence the content of Hollywood movies that depict the US or US activity, so I'm not sure why that should be particularly shocking. This is what happens in a globalized economy.
Except a movie could be totally subversive of the American government (the CIA or military is the bad guy, a national/state/local government is corrupt, etc...) and the movie could still go into wide production and make millions of dollars. Heck, it even is super easy to find examples of that (you want to know the truth? You can't handle the truth!).
Now try doing that in China. Make the PLA the enemy or portray a corrupt out of control official in Chongqing like Bo Xilai. Not allowed, because it is way too close to the truth for comfort, maybe.
There are a lot of US movies that go the other way - praising the US military/portraying conflicts in good vs evil way.
Example is Battle Los Angeles (2011) and American Sniper (2015). So such things are in effect "soft propaganda".
In China, to protect themselves against such soft influence, they enact regulations. Letting people watch all US movies without a filter is effectively letting US set the cultural standards and values.
I am not advocating for such a strategy, but since some other countries don't have the technological capability to make engaging soft cultural influence movies, I get where they're coming from.
This is an important point. We're usually only tuned in to notice the propaganda of our "enemies", because to us they're evil and any attempt to appear otherwise is outrageous.
Another film example is Act of Valor (2012). An enjoyable demonstration of real military hardware, accompanied by god mode special forces operators, jumping in to any country, saving the world from super villains. This film provides a sense of security to the US and it's allies whilst simultaneously instilling fear in it's enemies.
All respect to the real heroes out there, military and otherwise.
I really have no problem with that...I find these movies pretty boring myself. But the fact that a Chinese film maker cannot make a movie about china with critical social commentary is a huge problem for China's social development.
> letting the people set the cultural standards and values, by deciding what to watch and what not to watch.
If you believe that is how things work I think you may be being naive. "deciding" would depend on film budget (hire stars / pay for special effects), contractual agreements with vendors e.g. tv stations to play that content and advertising. How many people truly decided to have coca cola, mcdonalds and wear nike trainers....or did they do what advertising told them to.
In essence, you are arguing that people aren't smart enough (or are otherwise too prone to being manipulated) to decide for themselves in general, and if they're allowed to, then their decision-making process will be manipulated by some much smaller group of people.
Assuming that is okay for a moment. Your solution to that is to give another small group of people the power to explicitly override that decision-making, by fiat, without even having to go through the motions of convincing propaganda.
Which is better how exactly? Because this latter small group of people will be "benevolent dictators", acting in the larger group's best interests even as they override its decisions? They certainly claim to be that, but why should we believe them over the other guys?
Those are mild examples compared to the trend that started with, IIRC, Top Gun, where the US millitary trades use of millitary assets as props in return for the "right" spin being put on the movie.
I wonder if there is any correlation or causation between portrayal of the government in films and the actual impression of the government.
To me it seems that U.S. likes to portray government in a negative way in films, and in real life a sizeable portion of the people are also not happy with the government. The reverse is true in China.
Interesting question. We will never know the other way since the government in china controls the film industry, all films must get pre-plot approval. Whether pro government films positively affect perception, i would guess that it works for a certain segment of the mass population (a silent majority in Reagan's terms) but not really the middle class.
The existence of dissatisfaction with the American government probably drives production of subversive films, rather than the other way around. People are usually predisposed to media that fits their views, not the other way around.
I work in the games industry and we had to remove "Taiwan" as a country option if we wanted to release our game in China. There's a lot of push if you want to release anything on the market there.
The whole One China policy is incredibly dumb. Out of the last 120 years, Taiwan has actually been part of the mainland Chinese state for all of 4 years, 4 years in which they were in fact controlled by the same government as currently exercises sovereignty there today.
Looks like the Chinese government would like to ensure that its citizens do not fall victim to 'fake news' and has thus taken on the responsibility of 'fact checking'.
If you're trying to make fun of fact checking fake news, that is a totally facetious comparison. The whole point of fact checking is that the fact check / rebuttal is put side by side or preceding the original claim, with evidence and its own citations. You're not prevented from seeing the original claim, even if statistically fewer people see the original claim.
If the Communist party decided to replace all online censorship with modals saying how wrong the website was, and you could just click through the modal, I would consider that progress in China.
> The whole point of fact checking is that the fact check / rebuttal is put side by side or preceding the original claim, with evidence and its own citations.
I'm not well read on this topic but I would like to be. I've never heard this solution presented, likely due to my lack of research. Can you provide citations of this solution being suggested and/or implemented?
Besides that, while I agree it is better than pure blocking I still feel it would be a government over-reach. I wouldn't like a company doing it either.
Seems that the people who are concerned about fake news aren't advocating your strategy, but rather are advocating filtration. To keep out pernicious foreign lies, just like China.
Give an example of gatekeepers blocking fake news.
Reply to below: I am not talking about government censorship, which is obvious, since I just talked about it. I am talking about companies using fake news as an excuse to block what they believe is fake news.
More likely the gp was making fun of the way people tend to jump into discussions about Chinese free speech, pollution, racism or military aggression against its neighbors with "but America does it too!" comments.
Nah, the "fake news" filters make it hard to post the content, make it hard to reshare the content, make it less likely to show up in feeds, and mark it so that it is less likely to be read.
Given that the same people circulate between them, and they work together on a regular basis, and they both are critical to the survival of the society that exists today: I hold them to the same high standard.
I don't give breaks to golden parachutes or to lobbied appointments.
Unless you see the government as a company that has grown to a monopolistic size compared to the other ones. It's just an image to explain the rationale of those who don't trust it more than companies.
His recollection is not wrong, Taiwan didn't had a public election until the mid 90's, and even the 1996 one was a bit iffy, until 1987 Taiwan was under martial law, and until 86 you couldn't form political parties.
The Republic of China was a unitary state before and during the "communist rebellion", it continued to be a unitary state after it until 1991 (and until 2000 technically the KMT still "ruled" Taiwan) when the National Assembly which hasn't been (re)elected since 1948 voted itself out of office finally after about 10 years of some liberalization.
Today Taiwan has a ridiculous number of political parties (nearly 300) with 3-4 of them actually having seats in the house, tho effectively Taiwan is a 2 party country with sweeping swings in number of seats and leadership between the Democratic Progressive Party and the Chinese National Party.
It's not. Taiwan is fully democratic, has elected a president from the Democratic Progressive Party and has very few people who self-identify as Chinese.
Everything I wrote above is true. Here is more detail:
Ruling party: Taiwan's president is indeed from the Democratic Progressive Party. [1]
Self identification: More than 80 percent of respondents self-identified as Taiwanese, compared with 8.1 percent who identified themselves as Chinese and 7.6 percent who identified as both. [2]
Fully democratic: Not only does Taiwan have open elections and tolerate political demonstrations even the US wouldn't, but people have had referendum powers since 2003. This power was used stop the building of casinos in Penghu despite the moneyed interests pushing for them: [3]
Everyone that left or escaped Maoist China has an opinion of the mainland that is fixed in time, and is used to shape perception and policy towards the mainland that is completely incongruent with the sentiment on the mainland.
Well, China reinforces its Maoist image from time to time with goose stepping military parades that seem archaic today; then there is the bizarre censorship, and have you ever seen the cult of personality news cast at 7PM on CCTV? China does itself no favors in trying to shape a more modern updated perception of itself on the outside.
The only people that care live in a SAR or America. Okay that was an exaggeration, I would say the mainland sentiment isn't greatly concerned with the game of nations and are content with the role the grand administrators have assumed. I think it is a preoccupation of western minds, more so than of the minds of the people that actually live there.
If they do care, they definitely are messing it up. But you are right: almost all of China's posturing is for domestic consumption and thye are probably very unconcerned with their international image.
china presents an image that is almost North Korean to the rest of the world, even though this is far from the truth. The current leadership, which came of age during the cultural revolution, is even worse than the previous leaders in this regard, and they probably don't realize how bad they look (with the fake hair dye, but everything else also).
It actually sends the opposite signal: news sites, books, etc...aren't taken seriously until they are banned. The communist party hasn't heard of the Streisand Effect yet.
If Wen Jiaobao's family didn't accumulate so much wealth, why would they have blocked nytimes in the first place? It must be true, they never even tried refuting the facts presented in theat seminal article.
The US congress recently funded a mild version of Ministry of Truth. So they aren't the only one.
> Introduced by Congressmen Adam Kinzinger and Ted Lieu, H.R. 5181 seeks a “whole-government approach without the bureaucratic restrictions” to counter “foreign disinformation and manipulation,” which they believe threaten the world’s “security and stability.”
But instead of controlling the media they want to fund their own "fact-based" counter propaganda by building centralized media strategies with input from across the government, including the intelligence agencies, department of energy, state, etc. Additionally they want to partner and fund private firms, NGOs, and local journalists to help them.
> The first priority is developing a whole-of-government strategy for countering THE foreign propaganda and disinformation being wages against us and our allies by our enemies. The bill would increase the authority, resources, and mandate of the Global Engagement Center to include state actors like Russia and China as well as non-state actors. The Center will be led by the State Department, but with the active senior level participation of the Department of Defense, USAID, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the Intelligence Community, and other relevant agencies. The Center will develop, integrate, and synchronize whole-of-government initiatives to expose and counter foreign disinformation operations by our enemies and proactively advance fact-based narratives that support U.S. allies and interests.
> Second, the legislation seeks to leverage expertise from outside government to create more adaptive and responsive U.S. strategy options. The legislation establishes a fund to help train local journalists and provide grants and contracts to NGOs, civil society organizations, think tanks, private sector companies, media organizations, and other experts outside the U.S. government with experience in identifying and analyzing the latest trends in foreign government disinformation techniques. This fund will complement and support the Center’s role by integrating capabilities and expertise available outside the U.S. government into the strategy-making process. It will also empower a decentralized network of private sector experts and integrate their expertise into the strategy-making process.
It's not clear how explicit this will be. Hopefully it will be obvious, so the public doesn't have to then invest in identifying the US propaganda, which is countering Russian/China propaganda.
Please note here that the designers of the legislation intended for domestic propaganda protections to receive a new executive interpretation - that they argued current interpretation of domestic propaganda is taken "too literally".
This is significantly different than the Voice of America.
H.R. 5181 establishes a Global Engagement Center, funds it, creates an official in charge of it who works for the Board of Broadcasting Governors and makes them immune to civil law.
With the passage of the resolution, the Executive Branch is empowered to reinterpret prior domestic propaganda protections so that American citizens that do not believe official US narrative can be engaged/targeted by influence operations.
Why are other publications (the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times are mentioned) doing to keep Chinese authorities happy?
This should be a badge of honor for any news source.
The NY Times doesn't publish anything about China that they don't publish about many other countries. Certainly coverage of the U.S. and U.K. is much more challenging to those authorities.
They are all blocked. Even WSJ, which was mostly pro China, or Bloomberg, which is seriously pro China. Economist fell last year, there aren't many news sources left....maybe CNN and Fox News that don't do much serious reporting (ironic I started reading nytimes in china in 2002 because CNN was blocked).
Note even if the app is in the App Store, it isn't necessary that it will work. Nytimes app needs a connection to nytimes.com get news. So the app is useless without a VPN, and you can also get the app if you set your region to the USA (I have both Chinese store and USA apps on my idevices, some apps like didi and xiami aren't on the USA store).
If I recall correctly, the NYT website was blocked a few months ago when it published an unflattering (e.g. allegations of cronyism) article on Xi Jinping. The NYT is also pretty heavy on "China-bashing" though that's not really unique to them[0].
> The NYT is also pretty heavy on "China-bashing" though that's not really unique to them
I don't see it at all. The Times' reporting is equally critical, and in much greater volume, of the U.S., U.K., and probably others. The job of journalists, to a great extent, is to inform the public about problems; afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. It's not bias against China, it's the same journalism practiced everywhere about everyone.
The link doesn't really back up its claims. These are the NYT headlines it cites as "bashing":
* Hong Kong Protesters Seek Democracy.
* Discovery of Melamine-Tainted Milk Shuts Shanghai Dairy.
* Index of China’s Manufacturing Rose Sharply in December.
* Telecom Company to Pay $3 Million in China Bribe Case.
* China: Xinjiang Enacts a Curb on Dissent.
* A pioneering editor who resigned amid [government
censor] controversy last fall … named editor in chief of
a new publication.
* China and 10 Southeast Asian nations ushered in the
world’s third-largest free-trade area.
* Chinese Businesses Resist Eviction by Developers.
* U.S. Duties on Pipes From China Approved.
* China Executes Briton Despite Appeals.
It's not even all negative, and does not differ from reporting about everywhere else. One reason I like the NYT is that everyone thinks the Times is biased against them: The Clintons, Trump, progressives, liberals, conservatives, etc.
Ironically, these are among the "working class" issues that the liberal establishment press is accused of ignoring. And the Chinese government are not the only people threatening the New York Times.
It was Wen Jiaobao and much earlier than Xi Dai. Economist and Time were recently blocked because of Xi jinping articles.
"China bashing" is simply a euphemism for being critical on china, any kind of criticism is applied the term. The CPC just cannot accept criticism from anyone in any form, so they block it all out. Only low value news sources like CNN and Fox remain.
Chinese are incredibly self critical in china but do not like it when foreigners are. Face is a huge deal in Chinese culture.
> "China bashing" is simply a euphemism for being critical on china
I understand it as being overly or gratuitously critical of China but of course, it's hard to define objectively. Personally, I feel like most American media is biased against China but I hold a relatively positive view of China.
Try living in china for a few years, once the honey moon is over :). Dealing with the air pollution, GFW, hideous traffic, and currency controls will wear a guy down.
I lived there for 6 years and my wife is from Guangxi. Of course China isn't perfect but it isn't as bad as most Western media depict it to be. For one, it isn't a dictatorship as most people in the West seem to think it is. I certainly don't support the censorship but I quite like their foreign policy for example.
Seriously? Since 1960, China has invaded India, Vietnam, and less successfully Russia. In all three cases, China started it. It's also been threatening to invade Taiwan for decades, despite Taiwan never having been part of the PRC based on the historical claims going back to the Qing Dynasty.
In the south China sea, rather than accept a treaty that all neighboring countries including China signed, China prefers to go by an old Chinese map. Rather than accept the international ruling upholding the treaty, China condemned it and increased their militarization of international waters.
To the best of my knowledge, China has territorial disputes with every single one of its many neighbors, though they may back off their claim to 20% of Tajikistan since Tajikstan ceded just under 1% of its territory a few years ago.
China is actually worse than the western media portrays. Yes, it isn't a dictatorship, the opposite actually: rule of law is quite messed up, there is a lot of inequality, the Maoist pratices that we were all convinced were over rear their head from time to time to remind you that china is still very "different."
Westerners would have a more negative perception of china if they read/watched more of the Chinese media. It is so crass and biased (in a way western media could ever get away with) that you can't help but think things are very messed up.
My 9 years just ended. Granted, Beijing is more of a difficult situation than southern china, I could handle living in Guilin, liuzhou, or even Nanning (well, the latter is maybe too hot).
> Why are other publications (the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times are mentioned) doing to keep Chinese authorities happy?
It is an interesting question.
> The NY Times doesn't publish anything about China that they don't publish about many other countries. Certainly coverage of the U.S. and U.K. is much more challenging to those authorities.
I don't think that is true. Some of us marched against the Iraq war post 911 in quite substantial numbers. I still remember the demo in DC that went from the Mall to Navy Yard. It was huuuuge as the incoming President would have it.
Did New Times put a front page picture with screaming headline about our demonstrations? Nope. (I think Washinton Post mentioned it in the Metro section.)
Compare to when Egyptians took to the streets. It was certainly front page on The New York Times, our self designated "paper of record".
Your demonstration is one incident. Just look at the NY Times homepage daily; you will find continual challenges to those in authority in the U.S. Perhaps they should do more or differently, but they certainly do it.
And regardless, my main point was they challenge U.S. authority more than Chinese authority, which also seems hard to debate if you look at their website.
Are you telling me that if the equivalent of /The Patriot Act/ was created in China, or Russia, or take-your-pick-enemy-dujour, and passed unread by the legislature of that nation The New York Times would not skewer them in print and run multipage spreads in the Sunday Magazine detailing every questionable aspect?
Remind me: How did The New York Times cover that event.
I can't really answer, and I'm not interested in, what happens in a hypothetical world. Can you provide some links to real-world info that answers your last question?
Here are some facts: The Times broke, and heavily reported the NSA illegal surveillance story under Bush, Snowden's leaks, Hillary Clinton's email server, Trump's tax non-payment, and much, much more.
I'm not here to be their defender, but it doesn't help advance knowledge or our world to bash them.
> Are you telling me that if the equivalent of /The Patriot Act/ was created in China, or Russia, or take-your-pick-enemy-dujour, and passed unread by the legislature of that nation The New York Times would not skewer them in print and run multipage spreads in the Sunday Magazine detailing every questionable aspect?
We can try to find out. Did NYT ever run a single page on SORM-2 in Russia?
I remember when Apple removed the App that reported on US drone strikes and civilian casualties.
I remember that Reddit bans foreign news outlets from its news subreddits.
I remember that Facebook censored people trying to post Snowden Documents in the US.
This is a global phenomenon. We should do everything in our power to reverse this trend in the United States so that we have the credibility to criticize China for doing the same.
I wonder what is the largest legal entity a company like Apple or Google would be willing to flip the middle finger to and say "No, you are ridiculous, feel free to ban us." At some point the demands just become so onerous that you either have to have separate SKUs for that legal region (extra expensive) or you have to put the same backdoors or restrictions in all your products (which makes the product inferior for customers outside of the legal region as well as within).
Apple clearly isn't going to, although at least they have a very pro-encryption stance that we already know China isn't keen on.
Google already bowed years ago. They tried to stay out of China on principle with search didn't they? But in the end the market was just too big and they entered it.
It's easy to take a principled stance against North Korea (where users don't get a choice) or a smaller country that's pretty big like even Iran if they wanted to.
China is just too big for people to resist. At a certain point you're not going to grow much unless you go to China.
Let's take the UK as an example. It's a medium-sized country, and no one has significant production there. Let's say the UK keeps passing insane backwards anti-privacy laws and at some point told Apple to drop the encryption from the iPhone.
If Apple told them to pound sand and got banned from the UK, how much sales could they recoup if they kept Irish Apple stores extra well-stocked? If the response to Brazil's VAT is any example, thrifty entrepreneurs will do all the hard work of getting iPhones into the UK for a modest but very profitable overhead. A couple iPhones sold at 25% markup is more than enough to pay for a RyanAir round-trip and a week living in a cheap flat.
At what point do you have two products, one is a subscription to a magazine of fiction and the other a key to tell you how to map the fiction into real events.
This is one of the more compelling arguments I've seen for allowing sideloading apart from the obvious philosophical point about users having ultimate control over devices they own.
Apple has de-facto allowed sideloading via enterprise accounts since Crashlytics Beta launched (never heard of a company being capped for having too many users downloading their beta app)
As far as I know this is only with a paid developer certificate; if you are using the free one with Xcode, they require you to reinstall them every 7 days.
In older news - entire Google Play store removed from Android phones in China. Google cooperates by preventing its play store app being sideloaded and disallowing app downloads from its website to a computer or phone without the play store app.
Google Playstore is blocked, as well as all other Google domains. Your Android phone feels like a useless brick - you cannot even connect to a WiFi, as it tries to connect to a Google domain to check if it should show up a input WiFi password page served from 1.1.1.1 (iOS does the sae, but Apple.com works fine). Anyway, iOS works fine, as do Android without Google services preloaded. Bing.com is available, but Baidu is way better.
One aspect I found interesting was the hypothesis that states like China use censorship also as a strategic tool to strengthen their own business (Baidu vs Google for example).
China is a manufacturing economy, while the US is an information economy. This makes two way trade difficult because China wants control of information. It's hard to put up a tariff on Chinese products but it's easy to introduce information controls that cripple American business models.
Honestly, English language material isn't a huge priority for censors in China most of the time. You'd have to be _extremely_ prominent and cover issues relevant to the CCP's interest before I'd assume "sold out" is more likely than "ignored by the censors".
[It seems reasonable to note, here, that the same logic applies to coverage of the American government -- despite the lack of censors. Perhaps they leverage access to privileged information -- why leak something important to someone who dredges up garbage about you the other six days a week.]
It's not really that clear cut tbh. The blocked ones are well known (you can google it) but what you also have are things like:
* throttling of all foreign internet at particular times
* effective blocks on sites because they load dependencies from blocked sites.
* Temporary local blocking (e.g. It's easier and reliable from my home internet to load reddit, but from a coffee shop 1km away it's noticeably less reliable)
* interrupting of pageloads based on keywords. e.g. if you try download a page from a non-blocked domain that features keywords "free tibet" then the connection will get interrupted.
I don't understand why the big hotels in China have so much wider access than normal. It seems like they make exceptions for some places mostly visited by international travelers.
They have 'free trade zones' I suspect half for being useful for international business guests and half to look more open then they are to the global community. Either way everyone knows how to tunnel out if they want to.
Something nobody's written about or investigated that publicly is profiling/local blocks.
The gov places blocks on whole regions like Tibet/Uighur areas regularly, but I also believe that they have profiles down to a very granular level on which router/IPS has what level of trust. Public wifi is often unreliable for loading foreign websites or connecting to a VPN, whereas big hotels or my home wifi can be fine. I'm 80% sure this is real and not imagination :)
"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers"
"...Later that day, a separate team from Apple informed The Times that the apps would be removed".
Am I reading that right? Seems like the Times is not-so-subtly implying that Apple tipped off the Chinese authorities. Maybe they mentioned the scathing nature of the article that could potentially paint China in bad light.
Gmail warns if they believe “Your Account May Have Been Targeted by State-Sponsored Actors”[1] in a prompt[2]. I saw this first hand on a friend's machine in Hong Kong.
The alternative is to get banned from China, ensuring the only alternative is a company entirely beholden the government and unable to fight back against them in the battles that they can win.
Yes, they must bow to local laws. But not taking some of the spoils and directing that via back channel donations into subversive software like TOR - that is a choice they have.
I think MZs attempts to learn Mandarin, his visits to China and his 'courtship' of Xi during the US state visit made a lot of people think that he was desperate to get into China and wasn't too concerned about the implications of that. The impression is that the only reason Facebook isn't operating in China under a cooperative censorship regime is because China doesn't want FB (rather than because FB refuses to censor/cooperate).
Not really. NYT has solidly established themselves as a fake news site. It's very reasonable to protect the public from such propaganda sites that post fake news, do you not agree?
> In the United States, it is illegal to portray the assassination of a president
Full stop, no it isn't.
> Handling topics of National Security, such as Pearl Harbor, must be screened and if needed edited by National Security personnel.
Full stop, no it doesn't. Where the heck are you getting such misinformation? It is not just wrong, it is bordering on libel.
> Close partnership and collective ownership of media production facilities has given us movies with fake narratives like the Jessica Lynch story, Zero Dark Thirty, etc.
There is an audience for those films. There is also an audience for films that are anti-patriotic and can be considered downright subversive. The American film industry is huge, Chinese aren't aware of even 5% of its output.
Didn't know that. The USA has no such rule in place and you can in fact find many movies where the president is assinated (fictional and factual).
It is doubly weird for the UK since the monarch is just a figure head. I wonder if the law applies to the prime minsiter (after watching London has Fallen, I guess not).
The American film industry is also a huge propaganda machine which is aimed at consolidating western cultural dominance over the world, expect it's not western culture anymore, it's just the U.S. Entertainment industry. In the movie and cartoon sectors only the Indians, the French and the Japanese can have a tiny slice of the cake, the Chinese have nothing. So it's the only survival path for them as an original form of human experience: block content that's too offensive, buy the producers to influence them, and recreate a local film industry. But the last step takes 50 years, meanwhile they have to keep guard.
China does not make films that American consumers would want to consume. The best Chinese movies last year were mermaid and monster hunt...I saw both (bored on an air china flight), they were both absolutely awful.
There was a time in the late 90s when the golden Beijing Institute of Film class (the first one after the cultural revolution) was producing wonderful art house films that DID get viewership abroad. Sadly, this ended with increasing control of the gov over the film industry, and even the Taiwanese and Honk Kong films that we once enjoyed have disappeared to an industry that is now largely catering to the mainland market.
The future of the chinese film industry is more Warcraft and less "eat, drink man woman" (a Taiwan film) or "farewell my concubine" (I think the latter one was banned in the mainland), there is nothing there for us.
> China does not make films that American consumers would want to consume
This is empirically false: Crouching Tiger, Ip Man 1-3 were all well-received[1] in the US. I could add anything by Jackie Chan (and for a while Jet Li), but not all if them were Chinese productions.
1. The first had some overt propaganda in the form of a sadistic but inept Japanese occupying officer.
Nonsense. Since around 1970 the American film industry isn't aimed at anything more than making a profit (with an occasional bit of art for art's sake). Any propaganda effect is entirely incidental.
I'm not sure about the veracity of these two articles[1][2], but there seem to be a lot of instances where the US government have provided assistance, and indeed applied pressure to Hollywood. I wouldn't call that "entirely incidental".
There are many US movies that involve military themes that are made with the assistance of the US military. It's not surprising that the US military chooses which films it works with. So, if you want a US aircraft carrier in your film you're going to either use CGI (relatively recently available for most films) or you're going to use a script that doesn't show the US in a bad light.
This isn't overt propaganda in the traditional sense, but the effect is the same.
S. Korea and Japan make some great films that are also globally profitable and influential. Seems like there's something else going on that is stifling China's film industry.
It was my understanding that 18 U.S. Code § 871 included depictions enticing or encouraging such acts. I will look this up and come back with more information at a later time.
And to be clear here I mean a depiction of an actual US president. Not a fictitious president.
> Full stop, no it doesn't. Where the heck are you getting such misinformation? It is not just wrong, it is bordering on libel.
The mainstream news media is where I am getting this information. I remember it being reported on during the Pearl Harbor film some years ago (Bush Administration). Though I see it all the time: the SONY Leaks disclosed how the State Department and CIA helped to influence "The Interview" so that it would both depict the assassination of their president and to encourage civil unrest.
I take the libel statement seriously. I will pass it by my attorney. Difficult to discuss here, as neither of us are lawyers.
It was my understanding that 18
U.S. Code § 871 included depictions
enticing or encouraging such acts.
Not according to Brandenburg v. Ohio, which states:
The constitutional guarantees of free
speech and free press do not permit a
State to forbid or proscribe advocacy
of the use of force or of law
violation except where such advocacy
is directed to inciting or producing
imminent lawless action and is likely
to incite or produce such action.
The key words there are "incite" and "imminent lawless action". But don't just take my word for it. You can read the decision for yourself here:
Go ahead! I'm in the USA, where libel isn't illegal and is difficult to show even in civil cases (unlike say the UK). But what you just said was horribly unfactual, so there isn't much to worry about (you have to show what you said was actually true in any case). I mean, if you tell your attorney, I'm sure he will have a good laugh at you (after he takes your money of course!).
It was my understanding that 18 U.S. Code § 871 included depictions enticing or encouraging such acts.
If that's the case, I suspect that the relevant language here is enticing or encouraging. Depictions of, say, historical events would be different. That said, I am most definitely not a lawyer.
Death of a President was screened in the US. It depicts a fictional assassination of the then-sitting US President. There wasn't even a whiff of illegality around it, even if the big chains refused to screen it, it wasn't for fear of prosecution.
Newmarket paid one million dollars for the U.S. distribution rights.
The film was screened in the U.S. for 14 days, showing at 143 theatres at its widest release.
Regardless of where it was created, if there were such a prohibition, the film most certainly wouldn't have been shown in the US, nor anyone silly enough to pay for distribution rights. Note there were issues regarding screening, but it was some independent companies—not some government regulation—that made the decision not to screen it. All of this is evident from your parent comment.
Why is it so important for you to press this particular point, even after you've said you would refer to the law later tonight?
It was released in America, so it doesn't matter. America law applies (and the first amendment, unlike the free speech garauntee in the Chinese constitution, ours actually means something).
Assassinating the US President is a pretty standard device plot in many action movies and TV shows. In fact, if you had to judge Americans by our movies, you'd probably think we're all obsessed with killing the President.
Also, I could be out of the loop but I don't think the Pearl Harbor attacks are matters of national security any more.
Anyone else notice how they moved the last act of transformer's 4 to Hong Kong? Ya, Michael Bay found out he couldn't destroy Beijing or any other Chinese city, but somehow Hong Kong was ok.
Yes, in Beijing! But they didn't stay there long, and nothing really happened there. It was such a weird plot element that it stood out like a huge sore thumb.
Interesting. Thanks for answering all of my questions in this thread.
To be honest, I'm somewhat surprised there were any untouched cities left for Michael Bay to destroy after already having made three previous Transformers films.
Betsy Steinberg, managing director of the Illinois Film Office, acknowledges the cold financial calculations that go into site selection and the increasingly cutthroat competition: "Without a competitive tax credit, we'd be seeing very little business."
...
Paramount Pictures' "Transformers 3," which likely will spend at least $20 million during its six-week shoot here this summer, could qualify for a tax credit of at least $6 million, which it can use or sell, effectively cutting its local filming budget.
Your commenting is nowhere near respectable. You've already shown to everyone how you are willing to lie, even tell lies that are obviously lies. That might fly in china, but it has no place here on hackernews. It is just disrespectful to all of us and not wanted.
Remember all the people that made fun of "don't be evil" as a motto? This is what happens when you're motto is just, "how much is evil and its cheap evil sweatshop labor contributing to the bottom line today?"
This has been reported quite a bit for several years; see, e.g.,
http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/05/18/407619652/h... http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/15/business/media/in-hollywoo... http://origin.www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Research/Dire...