(Minghui.org) When a 1999 Hollywood movie Fight Club was video streamed in China last month, viewers were stunned to see that the ending of the movie had been modified. Instead of explosion scenes, the censored version simply displayed a message claiming that the police had arrested all criminals and an explosion was averted.
This triggered intense dissatisfaction and anger from viewers.
“This is absurd!” one person wrote on social media.
“I now know that the authorities not only delete information, but also alter the contents too,” another netizen added.
“This is brainwashing with no reservations,” yet another wrote.
It is not uncommon for Chinese Communist Party (CCP) broadcasters to censor anything and everything for political reasons, reported the BBC. “The Chinese government works tirelessly to ensure that the only stories told within China are ones that it specifically approves… creating a climate of self-censorship that renders filmmakers unwilling or unable to criticise the decisions of a government that regulates the lives of over 1.4 billion people and that increasingly dominates the global conversation,” stated an August 2000 report from the literary and human rights group Pen American, titled “Made in Hollywood, Censored by Beijing.”
Such a trend is alarming because it affects not only Chinese citizens, but also people outside of China. “Today, Chinese censors are playing a role in determining the content or message of movies that are released worldwide: this represents the risk that only movies that please one of the world’s most censorious regimes find their way to movie screens across the globe,” the report continued.
Recognising and admitting such misinformation may not be straightforward, as shown in Hans Christian Andersen’s beloved folktale “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” The crowd was deceiving others and deceiving themselves until a little child called out, “But he hasn’t got anything on.” In today’s society when the CCP exploits state-of-the-art technology to turn white into black, it could require even more effort and courage to discover what is real or true.
Take the regime’s systematic suppression of Falun Gong as an example. Falun Gong is a meditation discipline based on the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance. Since the CCP launched a brutal persecution of this traditional practice in July 1999, it has fabricated numerous lies to deceive the public. One such example is the self-immolation hoax of 2001.
False Fire
On January 23, 2001, the eve of the Chinese New Year Eve, state-owned CCTV reported that five “Falun Gong practitioners” had set themselves on fire on Tiananmen Square. Undeniable evidence, however, including detailed analysis of the CCP’s own video footage from CCTV’s Focus Report, showed that it was a staged self-immolated incident to defame Falun Gong.
International Education Development stated in a United Nations conference on August 14 that year that “we have obtained a video of that incident that in our view proves that this event was staged by the government. We have copies of that video available for distribution.” It also referred to this incident as part of the state terrorism created by the CCP. Chinese delegates at the conference did not respond to this accusation.
False Fire, a documentary produced by NTD Television on the topic, won an honorary award at the 51st Columbus International Film and Television Festival on November 8. With footage from the defamatory programs made by the CCTV, this film analysed the scenes and identified numerous gaps, indicating that the so-called self-immolation was an elaborate plot crafted by the CCP against Falun Gong.
