Houston Community News >> Pirates of the Caribbean Censored by China
6/15/2007-- CHINA has censored
part of the latest installment of hit Hollywood movie Pirates of the Caribbean
for "vilifying and defacing the Chinese".
The version of the Hollywood blockbuster released in China earlier this week
shows only about ten minutes of Hong Kong actor Chow Yun-Fat's scenes compared
with 20 minutes in the version seen in the rest of the world, it said. Xinhua,
the state-sponsored news agency, quoted Zhang Pimin, the deputy head of the film
bureau under the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, as saying
the decision to cut the scenes was made according to China's "relevant
regulations on film censorship" and "China's actual conditions".
He refused to give specific reasons for the cuts, but Xinhua quoted a Chinese
magazine, Popular Cinema, as saying the scenes were cut because of their
negative images.
"The captain played by Chow is bald, his face heavily scarred, he also wears a
long beard and has long nails, images still in line with Hollywood's old
tradition of demonising the Chinese," the magazine said.
Chow plays Captain Sao Feng, the pirate lord of the South China Sea, in Pirates
of the Caribbean: At World's End.
The film took in a record $1.3 million (about £0.6 million) on its opening day
in China on Tuesday, the film's distributor, Walt Disney, said.
Disney said that some of the scenes were cut for cultural sensitivities.
"They weren't quite ecstatic with how the Chinese pirate was portrayed," Anthony
Marcoly, distribution chief with Walt Disney Studios, said.
However, the same censors had no qualms with Chow playing a tyrannical Chinese
emperor who kills his son and drives his wife, played by Gong Li, insane in
Zhang Yimou's recent movie, Curse of the Golden Flower.