One of the most popular sitcoms in the world, Friends, is the latest target of censorship in China. The country's largest streaming platforms have censored parts of the script, especially those that concern the LGBTQ community and the narrative.
In the latest Chinese version, when Ross tells his parents he's divorced his wife, he doesn't explain why: She's a lesbian living with another woman, now pregnant and planning to raise a baby with her partner. Instead, the scene simply cuts to the stunned faces of his parents, and the plot ends there.
There are other, slightly more subtle changes to the series.
Joey's suggestion to go to a strip club is translated in the Chinese subtitles as "going out to have fun". When Paul the Wine Guy tells Monica, "I haven't been able to, uh, perform sexually," the caption says he was "in a low mood." Rachel's lament that she "burns" the gravy boat more than her fiance is translated as Rachel is "happier to see" the cutlery.
The changes drew sharp comments on social media from many Chinese super fans of the show, who mocked the censors' discretion and said the changes reinforced gender stereotypes, the New York Times reports.
Friends is the latest example of foreign entertainment being rewritten in China, as the country embraces more traditional gender roles under its leader, Xi Jinping. Officials went so far as to ban the portrayal of effeminate men on television.
Shortly before Friends, the legendary Fight Club also underwent major cosmetic changes for broadcast on Chinese streaming platforms.
When viewers in China watch Fight Club - most of the film looks the same as it was filmed and released in 1999. You know the story of Tyler Durden, Fight Club, Insomnia, the soap opera Project Mayhem and everything that goes along with this masterpiece of American cinema?
However, viewers in China, that is, on Chinese streaming platforms, are deprived of the apocalyptic ending of Fight Club, the ending that makes it one of the best movies of all time.
Instead of a successful plot to destroy a series of financial buildings and thus end debt slavery - the film ends for viewers in China with an on-screen message saying 'the police figured out the whole plan very quickly, arrested all the criminals and stopped the bomb from exploding'.
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Also, in the Chinese version, Tyler Durden is sent to a mental institution. The fact that Tyler Durden is the alter ego and fictitious character in the head of the Narrator, played by Edward Norton, apparently did not interest the Chinese censors.
This development of events in the film was sent to the public by viewers from China who watched Fight Club on the Tencent platform.
Fight Club is not the first to undergo this treatment. Man in Black 3, Cloud Atlas, Pirates of the Caribbean and many others that got permission to show - had to be 're-modified' for the Chinese market.
The news about the Chinese version of Fight Club also reached the author of the book on which the film was based, Chuck Palahniuk. This is his comment: "This is SUPER awesome! We got a happy ending in China!".
Even before the regulations took effect last September, Chinese censors were already working on these things. In the Chinese version of "Bohemian Rhapsody," a biopic about the band Queen, a key scene in which Freddie Mercury, the band's lead singer, tells his fiancee he is gay has been removed, the New York Times reports.
'Reluctant Compromise'
To some extent, the recent censorship echoes how mainland Chinese authorities once demanded changes to films from Hong Kong, a former British colony that was promised a high degree of autonomy when it returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.
The golden age of Hong Kong cinema included Bruce Lee's kung fu movies and Wong Kar-wai's dramas, and for years local production companies there exported films to Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and other countries in the region.
But when those international sales were hit by the East Asian financial crisis in 1997, Hong Kong production houses began looking to mainland China as their main source of overseas revenue. As the price of admission, they often agreed to produce alternative versions of their films to meet the demands of local censorship.
"When the exploitation of a new mainland market becomes a matter of life and death, such an unwilling compromise with market entry restrictions is entirely understandable as a measure of expediency," wrote scholar Hilary Hongjin He in a 2010 study of Hong Kong cinema in Mainland China.
Early censorship
An early example of such censorship is "The Inescapable Snare," a remastered version of "Naked Ambition," a 2003 Hong Kong film about the local sex industry. The mainland version adds a plot twist in which Hong Kong police team up with Beijing's Ministry of Public Security to crack down on pornography and prostitution, the NY Times reports.
Other Hong Kong films are edited for audiences in Southeast Asia, a region where governments and film audiences tend to be socially conservative.
Namely, the directors of Infernal Affairs, a 2002 crime drama, produced an alternate version for the Malaysian market in which a criminal who had infiltrated the Hong Kong police was arrested after killing an undercover cop.
"Liu Jianming, we found you to be a spy for the mob," the cop tells the criminal in the alternate ending, moments after Liu kills the undercover cop in the elevator of the office tower. "You are under arrest."
In the original version, Liu takes the elevator to the ground floor and leaves the building.
Pro-government laws
Today, Hong Kong's world-renowned film scene has become the latest form of expression to be subject to censorship since Beijing imposed a national security law on the territory in 2020.
Hong Kong's government is cracking down on documentaries and independent productions it fears glamorize the pro-democracy protests that rocked the city in 2019.
As for Chinese-language films released on the mainland, they now usually only have one version for both the domestic and international markets, even if they are produced in Hong Kong, said Kevin Ma, founder of Asia in Cinema, a news site for regional industry. They also tend to end either with the capture of bad guys, he said, or with a written code extolling the virtues of law and order.
As for foreign films imported into China, some disappear from local streaming platforms without explanation. In many other cases, Ma said, it is common for local distributors to tone down films through relatively small cuts. For example, the Chinese version of "Logan," the 2017 X-Men blockbuster starring Hugh Jackman, has less violence than the original.
A new approach
The Chinese version of Fight Club is notable, Ma said, because it carries both strategic cuts and the same kind of pro-government scripted codes of conduct/expression typically reserved for Chinese-language films.
“Cutting is normal, but adding a new ending for foreign films? It's new for me," he said.
Ma said it would be interesting to know whether the film's American production company discussed censorship in the contract when it sold distribution rights in China. New Regency, the Los Angeles-based company that produced "Fight Club," did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
A spokeswoman for Tencent Video, the Chinese streaming platform that hosts the censored version of the film, declined to comment when reached by phone. So did a spokeswoman for Pacific Audio and Video, the film's Chinese distributor.
At least one other foreign film was screened in China with strategic cuts and written code, according to the NY Times.
In the original ending of “Lord of War,” the 2005 Hollywood blockbuster in which an Interpol agent pursues a Ukrainian arms dealer played by Nicolas Cage, his character is released from prison and returns to selling guns.
But the Chinese version ends with Cage's character, Yuri Orlov, still in prison.
"Yurij Orlov confessed in court to all the crimes he was officially charged with and in the end he was sentenced to life imprisonment," the code reads.
By the way, only the first season of "Friends" was available through online streaming platforms in China, and many viewers in the country have already joked about what other scenes will be removed as future episodes become available, the NY Times reported.
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