China

Review of https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/21/asia/china-cultural-soft-power-intl/index.html

Many Chinese film directors have been frustrated because of the censorship of films because of the Chinese Communist government. Although China has said they want to increase their soft power, the amount of restrictions, films have to go through to be broadcasted has decreased the amount of people watching Chinese domestic films. Soft Power uses cultural influence to help sway international power. One of the rare cases in which China has made a breakthrough in domestic films is the sci-fi movie “The Wandering Earth”. This is just one movie that surprisingly made it through the Chinese government’s strict filter of these films. Many people think that if the Chinese government keeps going down this path of suppressing film director’s voices, they may never have a chance to gain any real soft power. In addition to banning and limiting movies, the Chinese government is also banning actors who have tattoos or promote “decadent culture”. The Chinese government have created problems in the film making industry that make it harder for them to gain money or popularity in the industry. For example, the Chinese censorship bureau expect these films to be educational and promote Chinese Communist propaganda. Many other countries have made a success for themselves in increasing soft power by letting their filmmakers have a lot of freedom in genres and culture. The Chinese government has still been restricting movies in China from showing Chinese history in bad light. Even if the film has become popular for the audience, the government has been unflinchingly strict in any of the films that don’t reflects their ideals.

I think that the way that the Chinese government has silenced the voices of these directors is very shocking. I was very surprised to read that some countries still have a communist government. Voicing your opinions and expressing yourself is a basic human right. The way the government has taken that away is not right and it changed the way I felt about the Chinese government. I was also surprised by the way that the Chinese government condemned actors who promoted “decadent culture”. I can’t understand why someone’s appearance determines whether they should be acting in movies. Another thing I found interesting in this article was that although the Chinese government wants to project their soft power that China is good, censoring the movies makes that idea less believable to the masses. A political connection that I found is how the Chinese government is treating the film directors and actors is similar to how the British government treated Indian’s voices. During the time of colonization, the British government wanted to convince the Indians that British principles were good, and they should abandon their Indian culture. They even made English the official language for some time. This caused much more of an uproar in India than in the Chinese film directors, but the way the both of them feel are similar. During the time of the British government, many Indians had lost their voice and culture because the government didn’t approve. Censorship of cultural films is causing the film directors to have a hard time reflecting the ideas that they believed in rather than Chinese propaganda.