It is not just political matters that exercise Beijing but also the moral outlook of art and entertainment
“The good ended happily and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means,” Miss Prism explains in The Importance of Being Earnest. Censors in China agree, as shown by a crude addendum to Minions: The Rise of Gru. The original film saw the supervillain riding away with his conspirator Wild Knuckles, who had faked his death to avoid capture. Chinese viewers, however, learned via end titles that Wild Knuckles had in fact been arrested and jailed for 20 years, while Gru “returned to his family” and his biggest accomplishment is “being a father to his three girls”. So much for Despicable Him.
Similarly, the Chinese streaming site Tencent Video offered a starkly different conclusion to Fight Club earlier this year, though it is unclear whether censors imposed the change or the company was pre-empting their potential wrath. Hollywood’s version shows the narrator watching as multiple buildings explode – in an anarchistic, anti-capitalist plot hatched by his imaginary alter ego. No buildings were harmed in the Tencent version; instead, viewers were informed that “the police rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals, successfully preventing the bomb from exploding”.
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