Hollywood’s Great Leap Backward on Free Expression

Re:Hollywood’s Great Leap Backward on Free Expression by humble_engineer on Sunday September 15, 2019 @02:27PM (#20978681)

Back in the 90's you used to see famous actors walking around with shirts that said "Free Tibet", but you never see them anymore, could that be because China is now heavily invested in Hollywood? Come to think of it I haven't seen a single actor talk about Hong Kong.

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Re:Hollywood’s Great Leap Backward on Free Expression by coredog64 on Sunday September 15, 2019 @05:14PM (#20979521)

Brad Pitt was banned from China for nearly 20 years for the film “7 Years in Tibet”. That wasn’t a career ending occurrence in the 90s, but I’d venture that it would be today.

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Re:Hollywood’s Great Leap Backward on Free Expression by humble_engineer on Sunday September 15, 2019 @08:56PM (#20980353)

And what is still happening in Tibet is sad, and the internet is full of angry atheists who have somehow been taught Tibet was a theocracy where monks held absolute authority and because religion is bad, China must be right.

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Re:Hollywood’s Great Leap Backward on Free Expression by RichardCA on Monday September 16, 2019 @02:03AM (#20981482)

It's a little bit more complicated than that.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/china-da...

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Re:Hollywood’s Great Leap Backward on Free Expression by bilbo0s on Sunday September 15, 2019 @03:03PM (#20978899)

>could that be because China is now heavily invested in Hollywood?

I don't know man?

I mean, right or wrong, it's obviously because they want to sell their movies and merchandise in China. The level of Chinese investment in the Fast and Furious franchise could be billions. It could be zero. (Probably is zero.) But that's irrelevant to whether or not the people who make those movies want to get that Chinese box office money. They want that money anyway, so they go out of their way to stay in good standing in China.

Should famous actors be willing to forego getting any money from the Chinese market to support whatever cause? Well, if they believe in the cause, then yes. But what we're discovering is that most people and companies don't actually believe in these causes, they were just supporting those causes to be chic, or popular. Like most everyone else in America, and the world for that matter, what they really believe in, is money.

Which, given behaviors observed repeatedly in American and world history, shouldn't really come as any big surprise I suppose.

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Re:Hollywood’s Great Leap Backward on Free Expression by humble_engineer on Sunday September 15, 2019 @04:23PM (#20979284)

You used up so many words to say Chinese money influences actor's politics. It's that simple.

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Re:Hollywood’s Great Leap Backward on Free Expression by flukus on Monday September 16, 2019 @02:34AM (#20981580)

Part of that is how successful their colonization of Tibet has been ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lhasa_(prefecture-level_city)#... ), Han chinese making up 35% of the population as of 2000, other more modern estimates put it a ~66%.

It's a lot harder to make the case for independence when there is a large Chinese minority, even harder if it becomes a majority.

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