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