Monthly Archives: March 2014

Hong Kong actor/director Jackie Chan and leading mainland Chinese director Feng Xiaogang made passionate pleas for less censorship of their films in China at a high-level Communist Party meeting in Beijing.

Chinas annual rubber-stamp legislature, the National Peoples Congress, is taking place in the Chinese capital right now, and the two men are among a number of top industry figures on an advisory body to the parliament, called the Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conferences (CPPCC).

Chan, whose action thriller Police Story 2013 recently topped the box office charts in China, is a Hong Kong delegate at the event, and he was unusually forthright in criticizing censorship.

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I know theres a risk to saying this, but I dont care now, because it seems normal that I speak inappropriately. If a movie is heavily censored, cutting all the sharp edges and corners, its box-office performance will suffer drastically, Chan said as quoted by the South China Morning Post.

The comments are a little surprising coming from Chan as he generally tends to toe the party line on cultural matters, and he has angered people in Hong Kong by saying that they complain too much about China and talk too much about getting more democracy.

Chan said that censorship had disastrous results for its investors and producers.

I have a couple of director friends [who went] bankrupt because of poor box-office results," he said. "Last year, China box office earnings reached 21.7 billion yuan ($3.6 billion), of which 17.1 billion ($2.8 billion) was from domestic movies. Within five to six years, China will be the biggest market. However, if Chinese films dont take marketization seriously, it will hardly have the chance to surpass Hollywood."

He was speaking after his friend and colleague Feng, who directed movies like the recent box office success, Personal Tailor, as well as Cellphone and Assembly, and who last November immortalized his hands and feet in cement at TCL Chinese Theatre, called for more clarity in how censorship was applied.

Dont make directors tremble with fear every day like [theyre] walking on thin ice, Feng told a gathering on the fringes of the CPPCC in the Beijing International Hotel.

Read more:
Jackie Chan, Feng Xiaogang Seek Less Censorship in China as Communist Leaders Meet

China is blaming technology used to bypass Chinas censorship systems for recent terrorist attacks, suggesting that the government is considering tighter controls on the countrys Internet.

Domestic terrorists from the nations western region are circumventing Chinas online censors to view blocked videos on terrorism, a top Chinese official said on Thursday.

The official, Zhang Chunxian, made the comment after a group of knife-wielding attackers killed 29 civilians earlier this month at a local train station in Kunming, China. The government has blamed the killings on separatists from Xinjiang, a Chinese autonomous region where ethnic violence has broken out before.

Zhang, who is party secretary of Xinjiang, suggested that virtual private networks (VPNs)services that allow Chinese Internet users to visit blocked siteshad a role in fueling the violence.

Right now, 90 percent of Xinjiangs terrorism is the result of jumping the wall, and following online videos to create terrorism, he said while speaking with journalists. A video of his comments was later broadcast.

China has long tried to filter out anti-government content, and blocked U.S. sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. But jumping Chinas Great Firewall isnt hard. Internet users willing to pay US$10 or less a month can often buy access to a virtual private network (VPN).

So far, China has yet to clamp down on VPN use, and only rarely blocked access to them. In March 2011, several VPN providers reported service problems in China, at a time when censors were trying to stamp out references to the pro-democracy Jasmine Revolution protests in many countries.

Lately, however, the government has been calling for greater control of the Internet. In November, China said it wanted to tighten its grip over local social networking services, citing threats to national stability.

Authorities have also regularly waged campaigns to clean up so-called rumors on Sina-Weibo, a Twitter-like service. Following the knife attack in Kunming, Chinas public security bureau said it had arrested 45 people for allegedly spreading false online information about other impending terrorist attacks.

Michael Kan covers IT, telecom and Internet in China for the IDG News Service. More by Michael Kan

Link:
China blames terrorism on technologies to bypass Internet censorship

"I know there's a risk to saying this, but I do not care now, because it seems normal that I speak inappropriately," he said.

Director Feng Xiaogang (Rex Features)

Feng Xiaogang, one of China's most famous directors, also hit out at the dead hand of the censors. "Don't make directors tremble with fear every day like [they are] walking on thin ice," he said.

"Is the patriotism, political judgment and artistic taste of the censors better than ours, the directors?" he added.

"We don't have a 'film censorship law'; to kill a film or not depends on examiners. Is their patriotism, political judgment and artistic taste better than ours, the directors?" he said.

Two of Mr Feng's films, Assembly (2007) and Aftershock (2010), had to be changed to comply with censorship and Assembly was nearly banned.

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Jackie Chan criticises Chinese film censorship