BANNED IN BEIJING

FOR HOLLYWOOD, CHINA IS A BIG OPPORTUNITY and maybe a bigger headache. The opportunity is that it is an enormous movie market, expected to soon become the biggest in the world. As Tuna Amobi, an entertainment analyst with investment research firm CFRA, says. “Every studio understands that to be successful internationally, the growth lies in China.”

The headache is that if Western producers want to show—or make—a film in China they must first deal with an army of bureaucrats who decide what Chinese audiences can see. Their names are appropriately Orwellian: the State Ethnic Affairs Commission; the State Administration for Religious Affairs; the Publicity Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China; the Ministry of State Security and Safety and many more. Their jobs are to make sure not only that China is always portrayed favorably, but also that some subjects are never mentioned, Chief among them are the three T’s: Taiwan, Tibet, Tiananmen. Also off limits: president Xi Jinping’s attempt to extend his term of office indefinitely; the detention and torture of 13 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs and Turkish Muslims; the suppression of Christianity in China and the harassment of pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong.

Hollywood has mostly gone discreetly along with that since China began opening to the western movie business in a big way in the 1990s (for a look at some of the films that have been censored, see page 41). Last summer Paramount Pictures, for instance, released a trailer for , its upcoming sequel to the 1986 blockbuster, co-produced with Chinese internet