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Ridiculous Chinese censorship used AI to change the gay couple in Together (2025) to a heterosexual couple
(hexbear.net)
Usually, they only censor the explicit content. But this is the first time that AI tools were used to directly alter the content of the original film.
By the way, the film has been withdrawn from a wide release in China after receiving too many complaints.
*Private company (the producers of the movie in fact) makes decision to do extremely stupid and unnecessary thing for Chinese localisation*
*Media blames Chinese Government for thing the Chinese Government didn't ask for*
EDIT: Is this even real? I am suspicious - https://hexbear.net/comment/6521304
EDIT2: Yeah it's real but the blame still isn't China itself.
I'm starting to get a little suspicious of Xiaohongshu at this point, they seem to be so determined to prove that China isn't some utopia that they even go all in on western style anti-China propaganda efforts. If their goal is to get people to actually understand China properly, they're doing a terrible job with posts titled like this.
How is this anti-China propaganda? This is openly discussed on Chinese social media. The only reason I post is because Hexbear has a large queer community who care about this stuff.
The title is misleading and completely ignores the focus: that this is a ridiculous bit of censorship by a company, not "evil China" censoring things because they are evil. This is "Rainbow-washing" type of propaganda, the same we saw when Israel attacked Iran, or hell, when they attack Palestine, trying to get people with progressive politics to hate them and refuse to even consider critical support for them on the grounds of not passing a purity test. That may not be how you intended it, but that is how it has come across to me, the title you used is virtually identical to western propaganda against China, though they tend to use words like "Insidious" or "Authoritarian" not "Ridiculous".
Why would you assume bad-faith posting here on hexbear though, especially from a long-standing user who is quite clearly better-informed on China than 99.999% of the website.
The title is NOT misleading lol. This is literally being discussed on the social media. Here is a Zhihu thread (think Chinese quora, one of the most popular social media platforms, though very much lib coded) with hundreds of discussion comments.
It appears that it is you who have fallen for Western anti-China propaganda that somehow all Chinese people are mindless drones that support 100% the government does.
No, we discuss and complain about things on social media all the time lol. You just have to be careful with the key phrases you’re using.
What they appear to be saying, which you aren't addressing in this reply, is that this is the fault of a Chinese company and not the CPC directly, while the headline clearly implies that it's the fault of the CPC in a more direct sense, like they ordered this.
The censorship itself is a process.
If the semantic argument here is that the censorship bureau doesn’t do all the cutting by itself, then technically the government doesn’t do anything at all. The government simply tells you what is and not acceptable.
As I mentioned, there are only two film companies that are allowed to handle imported films, and have done so for at least two decades importing hundreds of foreign films over the years. So these people know what they’re doing. The ridiculous part here is how they thought it would be a good idea to buy the film rights and use AI tool to alter the contents to get around the issue.
They have trot politics its lowkey annoying. I was talking to a trot recently who started talking about how china is oppressing the global south by exporting commodities and everything started to click lmao
How do I have trot politics? Trots would hate Mao and Deng. I am fully supportive of Mao and Deng policies as you can freely read through my comment history.
I am seriously curious how, after posting for years on this website, people still misrepresent my politics!
Western leftist who has only seen Trotskism, seeing a second leftist ideology: "Getting a lot of 'Trotskist
' vibes from this..."
I honestly didn't realize you liked Deng, though I guess it makes sense because you take such pains to divide Reform and Opening Up from the subsequent periods that you mostly talk about, where you (rightly) ridiculous the CPC for corrupt and bourgeois-bureaucratic elements. Is there any chance you could link to a place where you talk about why Deng's policies were good?
You can tell from my comments that I almost never criticized anything from 1976 to 1994, with the exception that Deng screwed up the price reform in 1988 (a legitimate L), which, together with the June 4th (Tiananmen incident) in 1989, forced him into semi-retirement, though his influence remained vast even in retirement. Otherwise I have always acknowledged his contributions as significant.
The watershed moment was the 1994 Tax Sharing Reform, which forced local/municipal governments to seek for alternative (non-tax) sources of income to finance their own operations. This led the Northeast heavy industrial provinces to mass privatize their SOEs, and the ensuing unemployment wave that caused an economic crisis in 1995-6. Two major policy changes happened afterwards: Zhu Rongji ended the welfare housing distribution policy (government giving free housing to employees) in 1998 to unleash land capital to save the economy, and China joining the WTO in 2001 to reverse the unemployment trend.
Looks like even OP is doing this
This isn't the first time. There's been a long running myth in the videogame industry that you're not allowed to have skeletons in videogames in China. This isn't true of course, but it hasn't stopped western companies changing their games for the Chinese region by removing the skeletons and replacing them with something else.
This is caused by some dumbass liberal media producers in australia believing the propaganda that China is anti-lgbt and disallows this and making this adjustment based on that belief. It's caused by western ignorance and "better be safe than sorry" rather than anything the government actually wants.
there have been different rules at different times. Magic: The Gathering used to do some variant art for the chinese market but sometime in the mid 2000s Rosewater said they didn't have to anymore.
I've heard other media people say the rule for videogames was you could show bones but not bones sticking out of flesh, so skeletons were ok and zombies were ok but not a zombie with a bunch of bones sticking out.
This is false. The film in question is a buyout/acquisition film, meaning that the importing distributor pays a lump sum for the licensing rights and the original producer does not participate in the revenue earning from Chinese cinematic release, so the purchaser of film rights has more liberty to alter the content.
The other type of film is called revenue-sharing film - and because the producers retain the film rights, this would require the Chinese censorship to list out their demands for the producers to remove specific parts of the film.
Ok but that's still a private company.
Depends on your perspective. All import films are exclusively distributed by China Film Group (中影) and Huaxia Film Distribution Co (华影). Both are SOEs (China Film is state-owned, Huaxia is state-owned joint-stock enterprise) but are fairly autonomous. This film, Together, was licensed by China Film Group.’
Again I encourage you to read the link above (with machine translation) to understand the topic in more detail because a lot of what you’re writing is misinformation.
I did. The link is just a bunch of quotes of random things Chinese people are saying on social media (with no actual links to where they said them so I can't source anything or even trust that they're real). What exactly are you suggesting I take from a bunch of random people online complaining that the change happened? Why does a bunch of random Chinese social media posts prove what I have said is misinformation?
What exactly have I even said that is misinformation anyway? You know SOEs act independently of the state, or at least you should.
Your info isn't even correct anyway so why are you accusing me of misinformation? You're claiming that this film was actually released in this state. It was not released. It was due to be released on the 19th of September and they cancelled it on the 18th of September before the national release.
This is version of the film has in actual fact not been released.
I don't know where the original article you're linking to is getting its information from. Either it's some private screening, a leak, or it's totally and completely bullshit. The quality of the evidence makes me suspicious, some weird low quality photograph of a screen, maybe a theatre, is being compared to the western version with a photograph of it on a literal CRT? Who the fuck is using a CRT to watch a 2025 movie? The more I look at it the more questions I have about it. The fact nobody is citing any real sources in absolutely anything is pissing me off.
I'm getting more and more suspicious about whether this is even real. China Digital Times is based in Berkeley, CA. Who owns this shit?
Edit: From the wiki for this site's owner:
EDITEDIT: AND IT'S BEEN FUNDED BY NED LMAOOOOOOOOO
MULTIEDIT: I'm satisfied that the ai edit is real now.
Again, it’s all over the social media, especially on xiaohongshu (social media platform) and zhihu (Chinese quora) that are extremely lib coded. They are the ones who care most about the LGBT stuff.
The page I posted is exactly catered for crowds like this. However, if you don’t like the source, feel free to take it from Sohu which posts articles from users. This is as mainstream as you can get.
Also, the film has been released in selected cinemas in 20 cities. This is how people have already watched it and reported on social media. No offense but you seriously are misrepresenting a lot of stuff here. As I said in the original post, it is being withdrawn from a wide release due to complaints.
This is a much better article. It at least satisfies the questions I had about whether it was real or not.
I do still think you are misattributing the blame for this to the government as opposed to a poor decision by whoever was in charge of the localisation for this, which would be whoever the team leader is of the team handling this at the import company.
This is starting to feel like wrecker shit. Is it just me?
I don't know about that. I like XHS in the news mega because they provide some useful negativity towards China on certain issues.
They clearly belong to one of the ideological groups that doesn't consider China to be marxist anymore. Ultra left or Trot or something. Not british Trot though because the trots here I know behind the scenes have all started to see China positively and as basically the only hope marxism has in the world. That leaves like, Ultra or Leftcom I don't know.
I'm not about to say they're a wrecker wholly. Some of their contributions are good. They just don't really have the same views that the MLs here have. What bothers me is that I'm trying to get to the bottom of something earnestly and I get called "spreading misinformation" instead of help to find the truth of the matter. I am totally willing to call China-actual out on things China-actual deserves to be called out on, but I need to get to the root source of this matter to do that. My blame goes with who did it. At this point I'm not even 100% certain that this is real though, I need to get past that uncertainty first. Where is the version of this movie that this comes from? Where was it screened? To who? The national release for this movie was supposed to be the 19th Sept and it was cancelled on the 18th. So I need to know exactly where this was screened and who put out this information on it being different to the western version to satisfy my threshold for "ok this ai edit did actually happen and isn't just clever propaganda" before I move on to blame.
My suspicion at this point is that it is plausible for western propagandists to get wind of "this movie is being cancelled/delayed" and then to make up a bullshit scene with bullshit changes for propaganda, push it out into the internet, it gets republished by hundreds of media outlets that all take it as fact and then it's hard to find the truth of the matter. So I think we should verify that it's actually real and not just clever propaganda.
and 2. there should be an exact source for whoever told the internet that these changes were made and whoever made the photo.
Where did all this accusation come from? An ultra or a Trot would denounce Mao and Deng lol. I have been fully supportive of Mao and Deng’s reform. You have seen my comments over the years - how do I still get misunderstood by the people here?
Wait you're pro-Deng? I am very confused by you lol
I thought your position was basically: China is being too capitalist and neoliberal and too socially conservative. Big simplification, but that's how most everything you write comes off. The first always felt like a critique of Dengism, but maybe you support Deng, but just want to push the left shift in policy now despite appreciating his policies for their time? How do you reconcile these?
edited out a piece so I don't misinform
No, I have written many times that Deng’s reform was critical, especially the first 30 years. I take issue with the neoliberal turn after joining the WTO in 2001, and while the leadership has so far done a decent job of preventing a broader economic crisis, it is very obvious that we are already past the limits of Deng’s reform and there is an urgent need to transition away from the neoliberal policies that rely on an export-led growth model.
It is already evident that the slowing growth over the years, the end of the infrastructure investment-led era, the slump in domestic consumption and the difficulty in transitioning away from the export industries all point toward a need to move away from the neoliberal model. This tracks with the fact that neoliberalism is also reaching its terminal phase globally.
What I don’t understand is why do people cling on to Deng’s reform as though it can go on forever? If Mao’s planned economy only worked for 20 years, and a reform and opening up era had to follow, then the natural course when such a phase has reached its limit would be to transition into a new socialist-oriented phase.
A lot of this comes from poor understanding of Chinese history and how its economy actually works. I’m trying to educate people here but get accused of being an ultra and a Trot lol. An ultra would denounce Deng’s contributions completely, and Trots would hate both Mao and Deng. I don’t even think many here understand the differences between them.
Since when have I said that China exploits the Global South???
Also I never said China is too capitalist. In fact, I said that China is socialism with Chinese characteristics, and this form of market socialism relies on building socialism through neoliberal principles. Very important distinction here.
writes in notebook: "shipwreck hates Jiang Zemin and the Shanghai clique"
Don’t even get me started about how Shanghai single handedly sabotaged the entire national Zero Covid policy just less than three years ago lol. I am still seething.
The biggest achievement of the current premier, Li Qiang, was giving Tesla huge incentives to build its factory in Shanghai. These people were so enamored with Elon Musk that they made Tesla the only foreign automaker company in China that does not have to partner up with a local company. And for this, he is being rewarded with being promoted to the premier position at the 20th CPC Congress (not joking).
XHS thinks Deng did mostly the right desicions, they just think the modern chinese goverment is doing nothing when they could be fighting the US hegemony more via things like replacing the US dollar and other policies, and this cowardness is going to kick them in the ass in the future
To be more precise, we have about 26 years of planned economy under Mao (although the last few years were just turmoil from the Cultural Revolution), which led to the reform and opening up era that can be characterized by the first 20 years of Deng’s reform. The limits of the reform model was first tested in the 1995-96 economic crisis, caused by the mass privatization wave following the landmark 1994 Tax Sharing Reform.
Then we have the Transition Period from 1998-2001, when Zhu Rongji decided to unleash the property market to save the economy and ended the welfare housing program (everyone has to purchase their own houses now), and when the decision to join the WTO was being made.
Then we have the WTO/neoliberal double-digit growth “world factory” era from 2001-2009, and after the GFC moved into the infrastructure investment-led era from 2009 to 2020, during which the over-investment and land speculation by local governments created a huge property and debt bubble.
Then Covid hit… and everything went to shit really. The post-Covid growth that was promised simply never arrived, especially with the property bubble bursting. What we are seeing now, with all these amazing development in China, is really the long shadow from the early years of infrastructure phase. The peak was about 10 years ago in the 2010s, and it should have been curbed long before it got out of control.
So the first 30 years of Deng’s reform and opening up was obviously critical, but just like you jump from the planned economy to a liberalized reform economy, clearly that phase will end some day (in fact, I believe we are already at least 10 years late) and the jump into a new (socialist) phase becomes the next step in the progress.
They’re not a wrecker, they’re just actually familiar with China and its flaws.
Video game industry is not the same as distributing imported films.
As I wrote in another comment to you, there are only two film companies that have the exclusive rights to distribute imported films, 中影 and 华影, and these are the two companies that have dealt with the censorship bureau for years. You are making a lot of assumptions about a topic you barely understand.
In short, very few people thought the film would even have a cinema release in the first place due to the explicit content - especially gay marriage and some of the body horror contents. People were in fact surprised to see it getting a wide release.
Yeah which is ironic because the videogames industry is significantly bigger than the movie industry now.
The best example of this I'm aware of is the Headhunter item in Path of Exile getting a slightly different skin that still has skulls in it in the Chinese version, but they're less clearly skulls. But the game is still a dark fantasy game so there's tons of skeletons; it's always been a bit of a question mark why they even changed the HH skin when there's skulls everywhere else.
WoW did it with skeletons in their chinese version, both on bones+skulls in the world and on the undead characters. Couple examples:
https://imgur.com/a/undead-1smvr https://imgur.com/a/female-undead-MPsE3
This is obviously super false and disproveable of course. I actually posted a thread about this when the recent Chinese Wukong game came out: https://hexbear.net/comment/5288533
The decision to self-censor is coming entirely from the western private companies who are acting either on their own bad beliefs about China or on very bad advice. It's not coming from the Chinese government.
Are you sure?
I've seen many counterstrike skins with variants of skulls replaced with gas masks and supposedly skins that slipped through and kept skulls on them bumped up in price because Chinese people wanted them.
I am completely sure that there are Chinese games with skulls and skeletons in them. Wukong came out to critical mass acclaim this year with skulls and skeletons and blood everywhere, it was pushed heavily by all media including state media as a darling example of China now producing AAA games titles.
You can make that argument if you want but just realize you're just saying the free market rules supreme and this is a slippery slope.
Next when Chinese capitalist media shows even more bigotted views you can also excuse it away by just shrugging it off "but why would the government ever control the media in the first place".
You can't simultaneously make the argument that the CPC controls capitalists which is the #1 excuse dengists make, and then turn around and say "but yes actualy the bigoted censorship thing is completely laissez faire capitalism the CPC has no control over".
People can cope however they want but holding simultaneously exclusive views should be a red(no pun intended) flag.
Isn't this what the reddit nerds call strawmanning? I don't hold any of those views. I would very much like China to enforce an ultra gay state. All media should be forced to be gay and China should be criticised for not using state power to achieve that. The fact that China has allowed its population to remain culturally backwards and homophobic for so long instead of using the state to push social views forwards is absolutely something it should be criticised for.
I can absolutely hold that view while simultaneously saying "But this isn't censorship by the government".