Personally I'm mostly offended how stale and unoriginal a lot of these jokes are, but I can definitely see why the censors took offense at some of them.

For example, the joke about the Chinese restaurant ("I'd be more concerned about what they're passing off as chicken") plays off of the stereotype that Chinese people eat dogs and cats, and the “passing off” remark implies that the Chinese restaurant owners are deceptive and would immorally and illegally serve their guests a different kind of meat than advertised. I can definitely see how that joke would be considered offensive.

The author labels that joke as "harmless" but you don't have to be a Chinese censor to interpret it as reinforcing harmful stereotypes. I dare you to show that scene at a liberal college and notice how few laughs you get.

Similarly, the racist remarks about Chinese people made by Sheldon's mom are somewhat offensive if taken at face value. I guess the joke is supposed to be at her expense instead ("old people are racists" is an American comedy cliche, if a somewhat tired one) but it's conceivable that either the censors didn't get that, or they feared that their audience didn't get that, so they decided to cut it out entirely.

"They wouldn't get that" is probably also the right explanation for censoring the joke about Jews eating at Chinese restaurants during Christmas, which is a very American tradition. That doesn't imply the joke needs to go, but I can see how that would, at best, leave Chinese viewers scratching their heads.

> I dare you to show that scene at a liberal college and notice how few laughs you get.

Did you see the recent video where the white guy dressed up in a poncho, big hat, and fake mustache and carried around maracas? He asked a bunch of white kids on a college campus if they thought his outfit was offensive to Mexicans, and they all said yes.

Then he went to the Mexican part of town and asked actual Mexicans, and they all said it was funny or that they liked that he was trying to honor their culture. Not one of them was offended.

So perhaps it would be good to ask a Chinese person if this joke offends them.

The important part of virtual signaling is that it has nothing to do with it's stated aims. Virtue signaling such as calling out the college cafeteria for serving sushi as "cultural appropriation"[0] is not because the people doing the signaling care about the art of sushi or the Japanese culture - it's narcissistic posturing by the person doing the signaling. Another term for this is "white savior complex".

In many ways the virtue signaling is doing the thing they are accusing others of - using a culture (that isn't theirs) as a weapon for social status.

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-36804155

I’d agree that that is the case a lot of the time, especially in the online popularity contests, but a big percentage - I’d say probably a majority - of the time it is simply sheep behaviour that has become ingrained

I felt this pull at university, when I spent a brief time flirting with the art society. everyone there had these kinds of values, and it would have made fitting in significantly easier if I had vocally agreed with them. this would have been especially tempting if I was (more) lonely and desperate for company, as many people are

as it was I mostly just kept quiet or carefully found points of agreement. I suspect if I was the type of person to give in to this zeitgeist, and not particularly question my beliefs, it could easily have developed into something real without any need for narcissistic tendencies

Yeah, when you're part of a culture that suffers from cultural appropriation, you understand it. Although my culture suffers a very benign culinary example (poutine), it allows me to understand the power play, and how I wouldn't want others decrying the appropriation my people are living.

Poutine is actually a pretty classic example of the bad kind of cultural appropriation. I wouldn't call it benign. Non-Quebecker Canadians are happy to claim Poutine as a "typically Canadian" dish (erasing its connection with Quebec specifically) despite many of them holding Quebec culture in extreme contempt.

Who posted that video, and was it unedited? If we're going on a single piece of anecdata, I think it's fair to question if the creator had any biases or was trustworthy.

And not all racism / bias is equal. Maybe you are right that Chinese and Chinese-American people would not be offended by this, but it seems completely reasonable that they would be, and the onus on you would be to get data that they wouldn't. It really doesn't matter what liberal college students think at all, unless they happen to also be of Chinese or of Chinese descent (or they are southeast Asian, and tired of lazy racism that doesn't bother to distinguish such things).

edit: it was in fact PragerU (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PragerU) which is intended for entertainment. It should not be considered reliable or unedited.

> and the onus on you would be to get data that they wouldn't.

FWIW I have a few data points -- this is something my Chinese wife has literally said inside a Chinese restaurant, and some of her other family members have said similar things about not trusting that the food being served is what they said it was.

> not trusting that the food being served is what they said it was

Chinese folks being weary of restaurants with swapping ingredients for lower tier is not comparable to assuming chicken being swapped for cat, which is a tired joke. Usually reserved for pricer seafood, hence pick your victim tanks. Many restaurants do similar type of substitute shenangians, like I'm pretty sure the hipster burger joing is not serving genuine kobe beef patty for $15, but they're also not serving ground chihuahua either. Like even in PRC you're worried about things like gutter oil at a hole in a wall joint versus slightly cheaper grade of sea cucumber at a fancy restaurant. Even during the pork crisis, no one was particularly concerned that restaurants were feeding them cat/dogs instead.

E: relate back to your parent comment, there's somethigns like cultural appropriation that most (especially older gen) Chinese don't care about, i.e. they thumbs up for white girls wearing qipao.

Swapping ingredients is pretty common in all kinds of restaurants; a lot of whitefish are actually tilapia no matter what they say, and a lot of farm-to-table ingredients are entirely fictional.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/02/20/fish-s...

https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2016/food/farm-to-fab...

And I did not know if you were Chinese or otherwise of east or south-east Asian descent, either. A group is not obligated to be a monolith in what they feel is offensive or not. And sometimes can be empowering to steal a slur / stereotype, but it feels a lot differently if the same word or joke is made in other circumstances.

I don't know the right answer, but I definitely think it would be understandable if someone didn't appreciate that joke. And worst of all, it's just in service of the cheapest, blandest kind of humor. The writers should be ashamed of such lazy work, regardless of bigger issues. "Would it work without a laugh track" clearly fails badly here, as it does pretty frequently in TBBT.

> edit: it was in fact PragerU (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PragerU) which is intended for entertainment. It should not be considered reliable or unedited.

Isn't PragerU a far right site know for promoting bizarre things? I'd would definitely call it "unreliable".

Good grief, I wish people would stop pointing to a particular subset of an ethnic group to try to "prove" that people are "wrong" to get offended.

1. Videos are easily selectively edited

2. Within an immigrant ethnic group, different subgroups will have different feelings due to their experiences. For example, 1st generation immigrants tend to be less cognizant of this sort of stuff.

Here's a bit of a rant for you- as an Asian person, I find these Asian jokes pretty fucking unfunny. It absolutely shits me when people will ask an Asian person from Asia what they think about some hot-topic issue within the Western sphere- yeah no shit they'll find it trivial. They're so geographically and politically disconnected from the issue it makes no sense to ask them.

They experience none of the effects, understand very little of the context and have very little stake in the matter, the only reason people would ask them for their opinion on these issues is so they can point to a foreign face and tell people like me "why can't you be as well behaved as them".

I agree with your sentiment, but isn't it a bit ironic that you made a point of emphasizing heterogeneity among ethnic subgroups, but then sort of took that away from what was more specifically mocking Chinese and North Korean stereotypes, rather than broadly Asian? If you were Filipino and got mad about a joke that poked at Chinese materialism culture, wouldn't that be a bit of a reach? Surely within Asian cultures, different stereotypes abound in regional humor, especially is it's taboo to joke about regional cultural differences

> isn't it a bit ironic that you made a point of emphasizing heterogeneity among ethnic subgroups, but then sort of took that away from what was more specifically mocking Chinese and North Korean stereotypes, rather than broadly Asian?

Yeah a bit. I chose not to mention specific ethnicities and omit detail to keep my comment short. Regional humor has it's place, but in more nuanced contexts. A Chuck Lorre production isn't the first place I'd look to find anything thoughtful and nuanced, to be frank.

Main reason I used the broad brush for "Asian" is because in western society, 1+n generation Asian diaspora are less likely to segregate themselves by lines of national grievances back in Asia proper. In addition to that, nationality is rarely the deciding factor on whether an individual is subjected to racial jokes (from outside personal circles), it's their appearance. I've been jokingly accused of being a Chinese spy, despite not being ethnically Chinese.

It’s extraordinary that people are taken in by such videos. Those videos are selectively edited to make the creators point.

Tell me, when Jimmy Kimmels producers go out on Hollywood Boulevard and find that not even one person can point to a country other than America on map (https://youtu.be/kRh1zXFKC_o) - do you think that’s real too? Or is that selectively edited for laughs?

I know the video was edited, it's by PragerU. That's not the point though, it was just a story to point out that not all things about other cultures are offensive.

And it's funny you ask about Kimmel, because I actually know the person who did those bits (she was the offscreen voice for the first few years and is actually the interviewer in this video). She said that while it was edited, they didn't have to edit it much, because about 80% of the people really were that dumb.

There is a bias in that we see such videos, find them shareable, notice their existence but really there's absolutely no reason to use either the Kimmel or PragerU vid as anything other than light entertainment.

That doesn't mean the underlying argument they propose can't be defended, just that the videos have no explanatory power whatsoever.

> 80% of the people really were that dumb.

Dropping in just to point out that ignorant, dumb, and uninterested are different concepts.

Everytime you hear someone tell their story you get an editorialized view (at the very least by having chosen to listen to them rather than someone else).

Those videos are clearly optimized toward the desired impression, but I don't think that they used actors to make their points.

On the other hand you have problems like https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweap... where you can construct a castle of lies and deception by only speaking selective truths...

To summarize my point: stories are ways to tell one of the many facets of the human experience, when told honestly they can be helpful to our understanding of both the common and the uncommon, when told dishonestly they can warp our perception of reality.

I saw that clip - there may be a valid point somewhere in there at being too easily offended but it's a stupid stunt from a non-honest broker. At the outset, the video's author's intent is to make liberal college students look dumb or like snowflakes, so that's what that video sets out to do but; there's no telling how many people they to talk to get cut on either side of the argument.

As a measure of whether a stereotype is actually bad or has negative effects, this sort of thing is a lot staler than a BBT joke, though.

No, but I constantly hear right wingers referencing it. It must be very popular in the echo chamber.

Yes, it does support a right wing point of view, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong. It's just one video, but there are many other videos and essays about the same topic.

This guy simply edits videos to provoke a reaction and get clicks. It is just business, and not an accurate depiction of reality at all.

It isn't even a creative or original idea. Remember Jimmy Kimmel's "The Man Show" where he got women on the street to sign an "End suffrage now!" petition because "suffrage" sounds like "suffering"?

It is an easy trick to embarrass people by shoving a camera in their face and putting them on the spot. But it doesn't actually tell you anything. It isn't a data point.

What "right wing point of view" exactly? That racism isn't a real problem? Are there mainstream right-wing organisations that actually promote that view?

No. The point of view that between being maximally uptight about race is different than acknowledging and working against racism.

That's my point of view and I don't consider myself the least bit right wing!

This is called Common Sense. To the extent that it's right-wing-coded in (and, I believe, only in) USA is only a reflection of how wacko their pseudo-left has gone.

The right wing uses videos like that to show that, "liberals are the only ones offended by cultural appropriation". The topic is far too complex to be encapsulated in a TikTok video, but the video is just an example of how it's possible that representing another culture could still be appreciated, and that not every instance of representing another culture is appropriation.

> The author labels that joke as "harmless" but you don't have to be a Chinese censor to interpret it as reinforcing harmful stereotypes.

Is it actually "harmful" though? People are still going to Chinese restaurants as far as I know. The "harmful" adjective is being thrown around a lot, but it's never been very clear to me there is actual harm. People will cite things such as "violence against Asian-Americans has been on the increase!", but that seems entirely disconnected from some jokes in some sitcom.

> For example, the joke about the Chinese restaurant ("I'd be more concerned about what they're passing off as chicken")

That same joke is made about a lot of food chains, especially fast food, like McDonald's. Replace chicken with beef and you have half of all the jokes ever made about Taco Bell (with the other half being poo jokes).

Those are companies, not nationalities.

> I dare you to show that scene at a liberal college and notice how few laughs you get.

Yeah, the show isn't that funny.

>For example, the joke about the Chinese restaurant ("I'd be more concerned about what they're passing off as chicken") plays off of the stereotype that Chinese people eat dogs and cats, and the “passing off” remark implies that the Chinese restaurant owners are deceptive and would immorally and illegally serve their guests a different kind of meat than advertised. I can definitely see how that joke would be considered offensive.

I hadn't considered the cat/dog meat angle, thank you for the perspective. In that case, I'd probably cut it too. I was thinking more of chicken nuggets, where a dozen birds are liquified and poured into a mold.

Like if you ordered the pork and was served a hotdog, the "passing off as" bit would still work, you know?

>Personally I'm mostly offended how stale and unoriginal a lot of these jokes are

It's CBS. The channel for old people on a medium for old people.

>I dare you to show that scene at a liberal college and notice how few laughs you get.

Yes, and? Everyone thinks they like 'irreverent' comedy until it violates the wrong proprieties. "On the way out of fashion" is a flavor of subversive comedy, often targeted at different audiences than "on the way into fashion" flavor of subversive comedy.

The people old enough to watch CBS are from a generation where they and their friends can exchange jokes at the expense of eachother's lineal stereotypes without it being inherently toxic. I just let them have their laughs, it seems pretty harmless.

> plays off of the stereotype that Chinese people eat dogs and cats

So... you support government censorship of jokes that somebody, somewhere might be offended by?

The original poster only said they could "see why" the censors took offense, not that they supported it.

Wouldn't that happen even in the US? A movie full of vile racist and sexist jokes bordering on abuse is not going to get a [G] rating, meaning the government is censoring it for some viewers.

Edit: it seems it's actually relatively easy to find jokes that are genuinely offensive and degrading in PG rated films. Why that's considered less potentially harmful to kids than showing sex between consenting adults I honestly don't know.

You are confusing movie ratings, by the movie industry, with government censorship. Movie ratings are just labels anyway, and not censorship.

MPAA ratings are decidedly not government censorship.

Age ratings are quite a different thing than making it unavailable to the entire public. I don't think you can just lob all censorship in the same basket like that: there's quite a bit of nuance here that makes all the difference.

I don't see any point trying to justify or argue for extreme Chinese-style censorship. But there are still useful debates to be had about censorship in Western liberal societies.

But they're not the same things at all; I don't think age-ratings are "censorship".

In Australia they are: https://www.classification.gov.au/classification-ratings/wha...

MPAA ratings are not government censorship, they're cartel censorship.

The reason corporations follow the cartel's rules are financial agreements and the fear of PR backlash for not letting parents outsource parenting.

So there's literally no government involvement in what content can be shown in broadcast material in the US? Even for FTA TV? In Australia the ratings system is administered by the commonwealth government, so I incorrectly assumed the same was true in the US.

Obscenity is one of the (very few) exceptions to the First Amendment. What exactly makes something “obscene” is somewhat unclear (see the Miller test), but in practice explicit pornography, for example, is not legally considered obscene, in part because the definition is somewhat dependent on community standards and porn is very, very popular.

The FCC can and does regulate over‐the‐air broadcasts to a stricter standard, thanks to its exclusive authority over the inherently limited wireless spectrum. It restricts not just obscenity, but indecency (explicit sex) and profanity (bad language). However, this power does not extend to (e.g.) cable TV, which is not broadcast over the publicly owned airwaves.

The US really does generally have stronger free speech protection than the rest of the developed world. There is no equivalent in the US to a work being “refused classification” as seen in Commonwealth countries. The First Amendment would prohibit it. Some retailers won’t sell unrated or X‐rated films or AO‐rated games, but others can, because the ratings systems are formed by industry groups and are not compulsory.

When the Christchurch shooting happened, the New Zealand government banned both the shooter’s manifesto and the livestreamed video, making them illegal to possess or distribute. I doubt such a thing could happen in the US. (I remember my surprise that NZ actually has a government office named “Chief Censor.”)

We have law that restricts indecent/obscene content, and it applies exclusively to FTA TV and radio. But it's completely unrelated to the ratings system for tv and movies.

Most channels not restricted by those rules (subscription cable & satellite) set in-house standards on content for commercial reasons. And of the broadcasters that are covered by the regulation, they are the old stodgy networks and never choose to get near the boundaries.

The interesting thing is that end result seems to be a proliferation of extreme views in the US vs other similar countries, which is arguably the opposite of what you might reasonably expect from the opportunity to allow freer discussion of ideas.

FWIW, neo-Nazi marches in Europe have way more people attending them than anything that American fash have tried to cobble up to date (including the particularly infamous one in Charlottesville). Radical nationalist parties seem rather popular in Europe lately as well, to the point where they already run some countries (Hungary, Poland).

Interesting, though not necessarily indicative of anything in its own right. I'd always expect a culture of free expression of ideas and a willingness to discuss fringe viewpoints would help reduce the proliferation of violent or socially destabilising behaviour, but I'm less convinced the degree of constitutionality guaranteed free speech matters all that much.

Is that the case, though? The US has problems of religious and political extremism, but is Muslim violence worse in magnitude than in France with its restrictions on religious expression, or anti‐semitism than in the European countries that ban Holocaust denial?

Good question. At best it would seem that such censorship doesn't seem to have all that significant impact on beliefs and behaviours.

For the most part, jokes are only offensive if they strike a nerve.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-walmart-china/wal-mart-re...

> Wal-Mart will reimburse customers who bought the tainted “Five Spice” donkey meat and is helping local food and industry agencies in eastern Shandong province investigate its Chinese supplier... The Shandong Food and Drug Administration earlier said the product contained fox meat.

Just today I saw part of a BBT rerun on German TV: The guys camp out in some lodge, together with the lodge's owner. That owner is also a brilliant(?) scientist, living alone in the lodge. I think he is from Germany, but that might differ depending on the localisation. He and his wife send each other cards once per year, for their respective birthday. Well, turns out most years, because this year he forgot it (Sheldon later realizes that in fact Amy is more important to him than science). Anyway, he asks them if they know the difference in taste between (wild) rabbit and squirrel, and since the guys say they don't, "well, then we'll have bunny today" and leaves the lodge with his rifle. The guys then leave while he is hunting, with Sheldon commenting "I know the difference, I'm from Texas".

So, as a German, should I be offended because of the squirrel/rabbit thing? Should Texans be offended? What about the career over partner theme, is that insensible to Germans divorcing due to career-induced burnouts?

No, it's just a joke. I don't believe anyone would think we ate squirrel, and I don't believe Texans do. (However, rabbit is in fact eaten around here. It's also a meat in France (who are famous for their cuisine) and... China. Says the Internet. But around here rabbit is more a delicacy, often for Easter or other special occasions; personally I think I haven't eaten rabbit meat in nearly a decade. Also, the rabbits-for-eating are large animals, not bunnys. Those are adored and loved as pets).

The rabbits bred for meat also make good pets:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdAi5Y8DDoNyX-4qcEcd-5w

On the other hand, there's apparently a problem where pet stores are selling similar giant guinea pig breeds as pets, but they're too wild and don't have the temper to enjoy it.

https://www.cavyhouse.org/%22Cuy%22.html

> can definitely see why the censors took offense at some of them

Take offense maybe… censor absolutely not

> I dare you to show that scene at a liberal college and notice how few laughs you get.

This is why, in a sane society, liberal arts students are not consulted for their wisdom.

Agree, these are 'jokes' are pathetically trite, bland fare. However ironically, liberal college grads are mostly the ones writing the shows. Hard to wrap one's head around.

No one is claiming that The Big Bang Theory is the peak of high class humor but I wouldn't say its offensive. The first example might seem offensive if you don't have any social skills but the joke is not about the eyes of Asian people, the joke is that old people, particularly in rural areas often make off hand racist comments and the awkward moments that result. The viewer is meant to relate to things they have heard their parents say rather than relating with the person reading the line.

I don't find BBT funny. The censored sex-related stuff is in there for its shock effect, anyway.

Some of these jokes which are censored for criticism of China are so tasteless that they ought to be censored in the American version as well, or better still, never written at all. A joke about whether the "chicken" at the local Chinese takeout restaurant is actually chicken? In the 21st century? That is supposed to be amusing?

I think it's important to distinguish between government censorship and corporate self-censorship. Almost nothing should be censored by the government. Almost anything can be censored by private parties (however cowardly such censorship may often be).

Government censorship can look at lot like corporate censorship, remember Zuckerberg said Facebook limited the reach of the news story because FBI informed them something. I am sure this is probably not the first time American government “requested” a corporation to censor something without the public knowing.

It's a deeper level of censorship. Not only will you refrain from thinking about these things in a tolerant light, you will refrain from thinking about these things at all.

It chops pieces off reality when you do that.

Censorship is amazing. So popular (downvotes anyone?), so casually employed, yet so incredibly destructive.

Indeed. It seems to have had the effect of removing pieces of reality.

I had a conversation once with a Chinese national, about an article about LGBTQ+ people in China.

"There's no Gay people in China"

(me, points at a picture of 2 young Chinese men in the article)

"They're from Hong Kong. There's no Gay people in China."

OK then!

(This was quite a while back, I suspect the same conversation today would play out differently, since the popular opinion is that HK is in fact part of China)

What a bizarre and ridiculous view to form based on one conversation.

I'm sure you can find plenty of people in the west who believe stupid things. Does that mean that western countries are "removing pieces of reality"?

> I'm sure you can find plenty of people in the west who believe stupid things. Does that mean that western countries are "removing pieces of reality"?

Yes. The past 20 years or so the media ecosystems have been trying to do exactly that, at least in the US where I live. Remove the bits they don't like, and invent out of whole cloth replacement bits.

I have heard the same statement several times too. I think the point was in relation to the context of censorship of LGBTQ content.

I've heard this from Chinese lesbians too. They aren't out in China, but other people are completely incapable of noticing they're gay, and other women won't admit they're gay to them even if eg they have just had sex.

This idea can be easily reversed:

It's a deeper level of indoctrination. When these things are covertly inserted in an innocuous sounding show, not only will you start thinking about them, you will subconsiously think of them in a tolerant light.

China has its own culture and mores, why should it allow that kind of soft projection of Western power.

> China has its own culture and mores

Correction: Xi and the CCP have their own culture and mores

The people, though, want to see The Big Bang Theory uncensored.

The people are different from Xi. They don't want the same things as he (except for the ones Xi has successfully brainwashed, or those who have a highly tribal brain).

> why should it allow that kind of soft projection

That sounds paranoid, I hope you don't mind. Reasoning in that way, almost all movies in the world wold be a "soft projection" and Nation State attack. But sometimes it's just jokes or reality and a good movie ... or would have been.

> Reasoning in that way, almost all movies in the world wold be a "soft projection" and Nation State attack

I mean, I don't think it requires any sort of active attack, or paranoia about a malicious attack, to recognize that soft power is real and it can influence people's behavior even when nobody intended it. The Big Bang Theory, as a reflection of American culture, can work to perpetuate that culture and serve America's interests even without anybody in America or anybody working on the Big Bang Theory intending for that to happen.

Now, in the case of the Big Bang Theory, whether that is good or bad is somewhat up to whether you think American-culture-as-espoused-by-the-Big-Bang-Theory is good or not, but honestly as an American who generally thinks American culture is good about some stuff but not everything, the Big Bang Theory is pretty far down on the list of cultural exports I would consider good or important. There's a lot of stuff in the Big Bang Theory that I feel ashamed to be associated with, including some of the stuff mentioned in this article as cut, like the racist jokes about Chinese people.

Good thing we have HN user cutemonster to tell us what the Chinese people want.

If the chinese people had the option between the censored and uncensored version, which one do you think they would prefer?

On an individual level it is obvious that almost no one advocates for self-censorship. Most people are only enthusiastic about censorship when they are the censor and not the censored.

The communist dictatorship is a parasitic form of governance, but most cannot escape because they're stuck at a local maxima.

I strongly suspect many if not most Chinese people would choose to see the censored version, especially if the stated reason for the censorship was "we have removed some things which may be insulting to Chinese people".

Most people don't like being censored themselves, but don't confuse that for a moment with believing that most people want everything uncensored. For all public discourse in America constantly talks about free speech absolutism and the horrors of censorship, US TV has "decency" regulations and there's absolutely no mass movement to ensure that TV companies are not penalised for 'wardrobe malfunctions' and expletives are broadcast without bleeps. Why would people from a much more conservative culture where public discourse attaches no value to free speech but stresses paternalism and patriotism instead be so keen on hearing alleged rudeness about their country?

I imagine that if the choice was to watch a movie with the family, free of annoying propaganda, that you'd be right. But if the choice was to never be able to see the "propaganda" you're being protected against, that fewer people would take the deal.

These discussions conflate voluntary censorship like age-gating with willingness to actually let someone lie to you, even in cases where you know the truth directly, and accepting it - ostensibly for the good of the group.

Please don't post insubstantial comments like this on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

For some things that might be true.

But when the indoctrination collides with reality in a harmful way, it's a different matter. Objectively, it is true that gay people exists and that there is no good reason to restrict their rights.

Sure, but like other people in this thread are saying, it's not objectively true that the Chinese restaurant down the street is selling you dog meet and pretending that it's chicken, or that Chinese academics in the US are siphoning grant money and funneling it to Pyongyang. "Pervasive cultural norms colliding with reality" is a two-way street.

Actually, I think there's a more benign reason and that is references to those kinds of things are just a bit below bar for normally civil programming.

If you've ever watched the banal things that people go through to get something past daytime censors, or, get a PG rating for films etc. it's similar.

This is not 'Xi's authoritarian' system so much as 'different cultural standards of the moment'.

Respect that in some parts of the world they don't talk or joke about STD's in that context.

I wouldn't want to be subject to it, but this is not the kind of censorship that's a problem.

Note that in the West, we 'self censor' tons of jokes or things that might be a bit off.

Finally - I'm 100% certain there are examples of this kind of censorship which are problematic, for example, the mention of 'Taiwan' etc..

I wonder how China protects its censors from wrong ideas (seeing as how they must necessarily come into contact with it). Extra indoctrination? Some kind of surveillance layercake?

I read a scifi where digital personality-recordings became popular for various office/industrial applications. Sorta like an AI, but human. They were used for censorship. The remedy for ideological contamination? Full reboot every morning.

You choose people based on their loyalty to the party and fanatical devotion. It's a pretty straightforward way of doing it, heck somewhere else in this thread someone was already getting offended at the joke about the chicken.

Some people just have no sense of humour and a fanatical devotion to a cause, they are useful if not very wise. This is one of those situations where they are useful.

Chinese people know about 'STDs' - they just don't put them in programming.

I'm sure they all know about Taiwan as well.

So mostly it's just keeping programming in terms of what they define as 'civil' - and - with the added element of pulling 'political censorship'.

It's about large audiences and averages not about the knowledge of a specific thing.

But this is streaming not broadcast daytime television. Censoring crude jokes/porn/violence that might be happened upon by a toddler flipping the remote makes quite a lot of sense.

Hence 1984's CrimeThink

I suspect some of it is just censoring for the sake of censoring.

It is a common problem, if your job is to inspect something and you find nothing wrong, how do you show that you did your job?

Here is an anecdote: in the game "Battle Chess", the graphists were quite happy with how their work turned out, but they knew it will be reviewed, and the reviewers will have to say something. So they added a small duck going around the queen piece, in a way that was easy to remove. As planned, reviewers said "everything is fine, but remove the duck", which they did, leaving the original design intact.

Western/American cultural messaging is very deeply baked into the popular media. What is necessarily aligned with, and un-subversive to, Western values may not be so for other sets of values.

In short, "bland", "un-subversive", "sensitive" are culturally relative terms.

Actually, I wonder if that would be a "good" way of making a comedy that can be shown everywhere. Just film like 40 minutes per episode for a 30 minute slot, but only include throwaway jokes to they can be removed as needed.

Comedy doesn't translate well, even among people of similar demographics. What makes one person fall out of their chair with laughter will make another roll their eyes. You can water jokes down and make them generic, but rarely will you elicit more than a chuckle from people once you've completely diluted a joke. What was the last "dad joke" you heard that made you laugh uncontrollably?

I think it's pointless to try an appease everyone. People should make comedy for their audiences and those who don't find it funny are free to ignore it. Just like, I think people should write sci-fi or thrillers for their audiences, rather than for everyone.

I read somewhere that if you're writing humor for kids, you have to strip out a lot of the context: they might not know what an Eiffel Tower is, but they will understand Big Thing. Maybe comedy that can be shown everywhere is comedy a child can understand?

China has a policy against feminizing men...so it's possible that the government sees the show as being a bad influence. The Chinese government probably also wants Chinese, not western, women to be seen as sexy.

I can't help but wonder what the first-pass of censors did to the big bang theory (I'm pretty sure internal review and the rating service that gave it tv-14 cut stuff out too)

someone should try and get Brass Eye released in China

> such a bland, un-subversive show ... is so heavily censored

American censorship is honestly no better, it's just that the show was written with the specifics of American censorship in mind.

Bullshit.

Sorry, this "we're the same" retort is exhausting. The United States government does not employ censors to remove portions of shows before allowing them to air (or stream, whatever). The closest thing I can think of is DoD not giving access to a movie unless it paints Navy pilots in a certain light. Okay, fine. Not nearly the same as what this site is showing us.

Yes, we have cultural taboos, like any culture. Studios have more trouble presenting some viewpoints over others. Chappelle gets protested, that one episode of Community was memory-holed on Hulu (but not on Amazon!). We ban pornography on public airwaves (but not on streaming or cable or satellite, or Blueray).

If you compare and contrast the pervasiveness of censorship between China and the United States, the difference is huge.

When it comes to artistic freedom, the US is way better than China. Maybe you can say we can improve even more, sure. But that's a long way off from our censorship being "honestly no better".

> The United States government does not employ censors to remove portions of shows

What? Yes it does - the FCC has been doing this for a half-century at least.

I noted that in my comment:

> We ban pornography on public airwaves (but not on streaming or cable or satellite, or Blueray).

And the FCC has a very narrow scope. I also happen to disagree with their prudishness (Janet Jackson, 2003). It does not back the argument that we're "honestly no better".

FCC always only covers broadcast TV and radio, not cable or streaming.

Which shows and which portions specifically have been removed/censored/banned by the FCC?

"Whataboutism" is so reliable in discussions of China that it may as well be the only card in the Wumao's deck. It's also a pretty defeatist attitude, were they to actually believe it, since it amounts to "Everyone is awful and there's no point in trying to be better".

Say the word "Bullshit" and then show a erect penis on Wheel of Fortune and see how that 'we don't censor things' goes for you.

I guarantee you that the footage would be a viral sensation online. King World productions would decline to air it, okay. But if it leaked, it would be viewed by millions.

Are you saying that a production company not airing craziness is the same as being arrested for calling your leader a cartoon bear? Is that the equivalency I'm supposed to be drawing? (https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/tweets-01232020164342...)

Not only would they "decline to air it" they are prohibited from airing it.

> Broadcasting obscene content is prohibited by law at all times of the day. Indecent and profane content are prohibited on broadcast TV and radio between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., when there is a reasonable risk that children may be in the audience.

> Obscene content does not have protection by the First Amendment. For content to be ruled obscene, it must meet a three-pronged test established by the Supreme Court: It must appeal to an average person's prurient interest; depict or describe sexual conduct in a "patently offensive" way; and, taken as a whole, lack serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

via [https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/obscene-indecent-and-pr....]

Christ in the Original Star Trek run CBS had a censor employed on set for an episode where a character wore a risky outfit to make sure no nipples popped out. That isn't different to this Chinese company making sure their shows meet the restrictions of the Chinese authority.

Your weird puritan country will air a show where a character shoots someone with a gun in the street, in your copaganda shows, but god forbid one of them gets a tit out whilst they do it.

My argument is against the statement that the US is “honestly no better”

You’re raising a point about RF broadcast of obscene content. That’s a tiny slice of available media. What China is censoring is being done as completely as they can muster. What the FCC censors is narrowed down to airwave broadcasts.

Surely you can see that there’s a difference here, right?

Tank Man is prohibited completely. Not just over a certain delivery method, during certain times of day.

Yes, I see that. My retort was to "The United States government does not employ censors to remove portions of shows before allowing them to air (or stream, whatever)." which it effectively does.

The scale isn't black and white with China being terrible and USA being great here, it's a sliding scale of shitness, with one being a 4/10 and the other 9/10, but the 4/10 pretends to be a 0/10 and proports "free speech for all. Home of the Free world. The government can't tell you what you can say and do." and the other doesn't pretend it is.

Then you’re arguing with someone else. I’ve never claimed the US is “0/10” or any such silliness. I made sure to acknowledge what censorship does exist here. I referenced FCC authority in that first comment.

“Honestly no better”

That’s what set me off, because it so obviously not true. It’s better in the US. Not perfect. But definitely better.

Not Bullshit. If the Government & Corporations care so much about others censoring, they should lead by example. Lectures by hypocrites will otherwise be ignored...even if the censorship that you may like is categorized as being justified by you. If you don't like China's censorship policies, then appeal to China's sensibilities as their censorship is categorized as justified by them. Otherwise, the Chinese government will simply point out that lectures from hypocrites have no bearing.

Let me make this simpler.

The 100 most popular movies produced in China are completely fine to stream in the US. Not a single scene or phrase is removed by our government before allowing us to watch them. Same with music, TV, books, and art.

The reverse is not even close. Can you give me a Western example that is analogous to Tank Man, or to Winnie the Pooh?

I don't think Julian Assange among other whistleblowers who are punished for speaking out about the Western hegemony's actions care too much about the Big Bang Theory's episodes in China...same with most of who are censored by YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc for political reasons. Practice what you preach or what you preach has no credibility.

The global south & many westerners are tired of the lectures coming from the NeoLiberal Democracies & it's easy for them to identify a long list of hypocrisy.

I agree with you that Julian has been targeted for political reasons. I can type this on a US site with absolutely no fear of repercussions. I practice what I preach. I also think our treatment of Guantanamo Bay prisoners is unconscionable. I openly criticize my own government all the time. And not a single post or comment has ever been removed by that same government.

By the way, here's the (uncensored) leaks from Julian: https://wikileaks.org/afg/

Edward Snowden really exposed the NSA almost 10 years ago. Yet I can still access the PowerPoints and other materials he leaked. They're on Wikipedia! That's like, the opposite of censored. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM)

Can you make a statement about Tank Man, or Xi's resemblance to Winnie the Pooh, or Peng Shuai and her accusations? Do it on WeChat. Let me know how that goes.

Please do not break the site guidelines yourself, regardless of how bad another commenter's posts are or you feel they are. It only makes everything worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Comparing an agent of Russian intelligence to Chinese censorship of Hollywood is just...perfect.

Absolutely wrong, the founders knew it, you should know it, everyone knows it.

There's a big difference between using the rule of law to shape what can and cannot be said or sold or published. Compared to different private publishers/agents/etc deciding what they wish to do. The marketplace solves the latter problem - and it has!

People are getting caught up in the "chicken" joke, but if you read the read of the article you'll see that crime dramas had to be re-shot so the "side of justice" wins in the end.

What kind of anodyne cultural bullshit is that? Only the good guys win - BY STATE LAW.

So absolutely not, the US and China are not even remotely the same. To suggest so is so ridiculous offensive it opens one up to accusations that they are a Chinese sock puppet... and it's a totally reasonable opinion to hold!

You can call me whatever you want. I'm saying practice what you preach otherwise you're going to be written off as a hypocrite & your criticisms will not have credibility. Consider that political censorship has been increasing & becoming a criminal & economic matter in the West. Julian Assange is an example of a journalist who is held in detention without being charged for political reasons.

Do you honestly think that America & the West have integrity with the Constitution & the spirit of the Founders? If you do, boy do I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

What censorship are you referring to? Streaming services as far as I know can show anything that isn't illegal. Is that not the case?

Streaming services can show anything...sometimes with supply side cartel repercussions that completely undermine the company...such as the case with Parler.

Content providers are censored by streaming providers for political reasons. Hate speech laws in England & Europe criminalizes (jail time) people for saying the wrong things about protected political groups.

Banks & the Canadian government have criminalized people donating to the Trucker protest. The protest leaders are still held in detention. Also journalists have doxxed the people who donate.

January 6th protesters are help in prison & finances ruined by having to fight a federal case for attending a protest. And if you want to call it an insurrection to excuse the authoritarian response China does the same against people who protests there.