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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By the way, the film has been withdrawn from a wide release in China after receiving too many complaints.
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.
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.
Thank you for explaining. Do you have a comment where you explain what the motivations were for the Tax Sharing Reform to begin with? Was it a means of instigating mass-privatization indirectly?
Ive met trots that like deng. Im just saying that complaining about china to random people on the internet instead of just doing somethig to fix it if ur chinese is liberal behavior. I dont think ur a bad person but its a tendency of a petty bourgeois class outlook
lol, the only reasons I am posting here are to 1) practice my English and 2) provide some educational value stuff to people who are interested in learning about China. You can choose to ignore my posts if you don’t like to learn about this kind of things, which is completely fair.
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.
I didn't call it bad faith, I'm saying it works the same way western anti-China propaganda does.
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.
I'm not saying that the bureau is not censoring something by preventing it from being screened in X form due to content, obviously that is censorship and I'm sure you could produce for me an endless list of things that they are absolutely to blame for censoring in a targeted manner on socially reactionary grounds. I guess I would say that it's semantically true that the headline is misleading in that it makes it sound like the CPC is responsible in a direct manner for AI being used to make the couple het, but that's not what I was talking about.
What I mean is that, while a number of the scenes being removed is commonplace, and sometimes there are other revisions like the one people made fun of at the end of Fight Club (which I think was clumsy but not a bad change, especially given that it was more faithful to the book!), something like this is anomalous -- which is why it's such a news story to begin with -- and it's not clear with the given information if it's because of the bureau blocking the film beyond the expected degree or because some shithead executive got a great idea for using AI to "streamline" their editing process to minimize back-and-forth with the bureau or something.
I'm of course glad that it has received some degree of popular pushback, because this shouldn't be tolerated in either case.