While rumors have swirled that the coronavirus pandemic originated in bats and then infected another animal that passed it onto people at a market in the southeastern Chinese city of Wuhan, scientists have not yet determined exactly how the new coronavirus infected people.

But these kinds of wet markets, which have long included bizarre and unusual items, are known to operate in not the most sanitary conditions.

“You’ve got live animals, so there’s feces everywhere. There’s blood because of people chopping them up,” Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, which works to protect wildlife and public health from emerging diseases, told the Associated Press last month.

“Wet markets,” as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, are places “for the sale of fresh meat, fish, and produce.” They also sell an array of exotic animals.

The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, before its closure, advertised dozens of species such as giant salamanders, baby crocodiles and raccoon dogs that were often referred to as wildlife, even when they were farmed, according to the AP.

And like many other “wet markets” in Asia and elsewhere, the animals at the Wuhan market lived in close proximity as they were tied up or stacked in cages.

Animals in “wet markets” are often killed on-site to ensure freshness — yet the messy mix raises the odds that a new virus will jump to people handling the animals and start to spread, experts say.

“I visited the Tai Po wet market in Hong Kong, and it’s quite obvious why the term ‘wet’ is used,” an NPR reporter wrote about them earlier this year.

“Live fish in open tubs splash water all over the floor. The countertops of the stalls are red with blood as fish are gutted and filleted right in front of the customers’ eyes. Live turtles and crustaceans climb over each other in boxes,” he described. “Melting ice adds to the slush on the floor. There’s lots of water, blood, fish scales and chicken guts. Things are wet.”

On Monday, China’s National People’s Congress issued an order to ban all consumption of wild animal meat and further restrict the wildlife trade nationwide. The measures are expected to be enshrined in the country’s wildlife protection law later this year.

The ban is a swift response to the Covid-19 outbreak, thought to have originated in wildlife sold at a market in Wuhan, Hubei province in early December.

However, the Shenzhen government’s potential ban on dog and cat meat is framed not as part of an effort to reduce disease transmission, but as an aspect of the special relationship between people and pets, which it has called the “consensus of all human civilisation”.

“Shenzhen might just be able to do it, as it is a progressive city in many ways,” said Deborah Cao, a professor at Griffith University in Australia and expert on animal protection in China. “I really hope so.”

Consumption of dog and cat meat is most common in Shenzhen’s home province of Guangdong, neighbouring Guangxi, and parts of north-east China, though it is not universally practised across the country and has become less acceptable over time. Taiwan outlawed the consumption of dog and cat meat in 2017.

“Dog eating has become increasingly controversial in China, with frequent violent clashes between dog thieves and angry dog owners,” said Wendy Higgins, director of international media at Humane Society International (HSI).

“There is a growing and vocal Chinese opposition to the dog and cat meat trade, and young people in China are far more likely to think of dogs as companions than cuisine,” she said.

The draft regulation is now in a public comment phase running until 5 March and no timeline has been given for the final determination.

If the ban goes through, other animals identified as potentially carrying disease – such as turtles, snakes, some birds and insects – could be included on a list of prohibited animals for consumption in line with national rules that are expected in the coming months.

Under the Shenzhen ban, fines for serving banned animals at restaurants would range from 20,000 to 200,000 yuan (£2,200–£22,000).

HSI has estimated that between 10 and 20 million dogs are killed in China for their meat annually, while protection group Animals Asia puts the figure for cats at roughly 4 million a year.

“The vast majority of dogs caught up in the trade in China are stolen pets and strays snatched from the streets,” Higgins said. “After being stolen or snatched, the animals are crammed in small cages in their hundreds, unable to move, and piled on the back of trucks, packed so tightly they can break limbs.”

Animal protection groups have long been concerned with practices used in the dog meat trade, from rearing and theft to transport and slaughter.

Next month sees the release of Disney’s latest live-action remake in Mulan. But the $200 million movie has seen a kiss scene removed after China’s local executives demand its censorship. The intimate moment was between Mulan and her love interest Chen Honghui.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Disney showed Mulan at a Chinese test screening.

Aside from the audience, members of China’s local executives viewed the film too.

And in the early cut, the kiss scene on a bridge did not go down well with the authorities.

Director Niki Caro said: “It was very beautiful, but the China office went, ‘No, you can’t, that doesn’t feel right to the Chinese people.”

And in the end, Disney bowed to China’s censorship demand.

She added: “So we took it out.”

Last year the release of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood was cancelled in China, allegedly over the portrayal of Bruce Lee.

However, Chinese cinemas did release the previously banned Spirited Away earlier in 2019.

The Oscar-winning Studio Ghibli classic hit cinemas in 2001 but has finally come out in China.

As for why Spirited Away was banned in the first place, it may have something to do with previous tensions in Sino-Japanese relations which have thawed in recent years.

Another reason could be the spiritual content of Spirited Away, since China’s official regulator prohibits films that “promote cults or superstition” because such ideas are not compatible with the ruling Communist Party’s atheistic secularism.

This resulted in the female-led Ghostbusters reboot being banned in China.

Meanwhile, fears over coronavirus, which originated in China, could affect the box office of big Hollywood releases in the coming months.

The Asian country has closed 70,000 cinema screen to contain it.

According to The Sunday Times, the Chinese press tour for new James Bond movie No Time To Die has been cancelled.

The closure of the movie theatres in China could mean No Time To Die takes a big financial hit, as it may for Mulan too.

After all, China is now the world’s second-biggest region for the box office after the US.

Last year, Avengers Endgame became the highest-grossing movie all time with almost $3 billion made worldwide.

Part of such a monumental sum was £450 million from China alone.

Patients who came down with disease at the end of December all had connections to the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan China. The complex of stalls selling live fish, meat and wild animals is known in the region as a “wet market.” Researchers believe the new virus probably mutated from a coronavirus common in animals and jumped over to humans in the Wuhan bazaar.

I visited the Tai Po wet market in Hong Kong, and it’s quite obvious why the term “wet” is used. Live fish in open tubs splash water all over the floor. The countertops of the stalls are red with blood as fish are gutted and filleted right in front of the customers’ eyes. Live turtles and crustaceans climb over each other in boxes. Melting ice adds to the slush on the floor. There’s lots of water, blood, fish scales and chicken guts. Things are wet.

At the Tai Po market, a woman who runs a shellfish stall — she only wants to give her name as Mrs. Wong — says people blame wet markets for spreading disease. But she says that’s not fair. Like just about everyone else in the market. Wong is wearing a surgical face mask because of the coronavirus outbreak. She’s heard about the links between the wet market in Wuhan, China, and the coronavirus but doesn’t think something like that would happen in Hong Kong.

“It’s much cleaner in the Hong Kong markets. It’s so different from what’s happening in mainland China,” she says. “When I go to mainland China and I’m trying to eat something, I’m concerned about what’s in the food.”

Meanwhile, this kind of market is not just an Asian phenomenon. There are similar markets all over the world — places where fish, poultry and other animals are slaughtered and butchered right on the premises.

But researchers of zoonotic diseases — diseases that jump from animals to humans – pinpoint the wet markets in mainland China as particularly problematic for several reasons. First, these markets often have many different kinds of animals – some wild, some domesticated but not necessarily native to that part of Asia.

The stress of captivity in these chaotic markets weakens the animals’ immune systems and creates an environment where viruses from different species can mingle, swap bits of their genetic code and spread from one species to another, according to biologist Kevin Olival, vice president for research at the EcoHealth Alliance. When that happens, occasionally a new strain of an animal virus gets a foothold in humans and an outbreak like this current coronavirus erupts.

The Tai Po market in Hong Kong does have some live animals besides the seafood but the selection is rather boring compared to the exotic assortment of snakes, mammals and birds on offer in some markets in mainland China. They’re known to sell animals such as Himalayan palm civets, raccoon dogs, wild boars and cobras.

The only live birds in Tai Po are chickens, which are kept behind the butchered pork section of the market.

Chan Shu Chung has been selling chicken here for more than 10 years. He says business is really good right now because the price of pork — his main competition — is through the roof. Pork is in short supply due to trade tensions between China and the U.S. and a recent bout of swine flu.

So people are buying more chicken. Customers can select a live bird from Chung’s cages. Chung pulls them out by their feet, holds them upside down to show off their plump breasts. If the customer is happy with the bird, Chung puts a plastic tag with a number on the chicken’s foot. He gives the customer a matching tag, sort of like a coat check. Fifteen minutes later the shopper can come back and pick up the chicken meat.

Chung says he and his colleagues do their best to keep the area clean. They wash down the stalls regularly and disinfect the countertops to stop germs from spreading.

Chung, however, is one of the few people in the market who is not wearing a face mask. Face masks have become so common in Hong Kong since the coronavirus outbreak started that pharmacies across the city are sold out of them.

Chung says he isn’t afraid of this new coronavirus. He always gets his annual flu shot so he believes he’s protected against this new disease, even though scientists say the flu shot will not protect people against this new coronavirus.

Chung adds confidently that he’s even immune to SARS — for which there also is no commercially available vaccine.

But he does keep his chicken stalls incredibly clean, which public health officials say is one important step in stopping the spread of diseases. So maybe he’s onto something.

Barely a week after a single tweet detonated a firestorm against the Houston Rockets and the NBA, another international incident has erupted. But this time, China is the country being punished.

It began over the weekend, when moviegoers in Vietnam noticed something shocking on their screens while they were watching “Abominable,” an animated film about a girl called Yi in a city that looks a lot like Shanghai. She finds a yeti on her roof and embarks on a journey across China — replete with soaring mountains and fields of yellow canola flowers, not a polluted sky in sight — to guide him home to Mount Everest.

The film was the first co-production between DreamWorks Animation, the American production company owned by NBCUniversal, and Shanghai-based Pearl Studio. The heads of the studios wanted to create a film that would appeal equally to American and Chinese audiences, enabling them to capture the two largest movie markets.

But perhaps the Chinese side went too far in appealing to nationalist tendencies in Beijing.

In one scene, Yi repeatedly walks past a map on a wall, which contains the unmistakable dotted U-shape of the nine-dash line, encompassing a swath of the South China Sea that Beijing claims as its own. Other countries — including the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam — claim rights to the resource-rich sea.

The Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled against China in 2016, declaring that Beijing’s assertion of sovereignty over the South China Sea has no legal or historical basis.

Beijing rejected the decision and has continued to patrol and build islands in the sea to extend its de facto control over the waterway.

Tensions have grown in recent months as a Chinese survey ship with a coast guard escort has sailed through an area controlled by Vietnam. Vietnam has licensed Russian energy giant Rosneft to explore for oil in the area, prompting protests from China.

So moviegoers in Vietnam, where the film is called “Everest: Tiny Snowman,” were outraged to see the dotted line on the map over the weekend. Some shared it on social media, and that prompted officials to take action against the film, which opened in Vietnam on Oct. 4.

“We will revoke [the film’s license],” Deputy Culture Minister Ta Quang Dong told the Thanh Nien newspaper, according to Reuters.

Another official, cinema department director Nguyen Thu Ha, confirmed the action. “We will be more alert and cautious in future,” Vietnam Insider quoted her as saying.

Vietnam’s main movie-theater chain, South Korean-owned CGV, stopped selling tickets to the film, said representative Hoang Hai. All information and trailers have been removed from its website and YouTube channel.

DreamWorks could not be reached for comment, and Pearl Studio did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

It was not the dotted line’s first appearance this month on screens outside China.

ESPN, the U.S. sports channel, was sharply criticized for using a map showing the line — although it had 10 dashes — when reporting on the furor over a tweet by Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets basketball team. That stemmed from a different territorial sore point: the protests in Hong Kong over Beijing’s increasingly heavy-handed governance of the supposedly semiautonomous territory.

The nine-dash line is seldom, if ever, used by anyone outside China, and ESPN was accused of going too far to try to appease Beijing.

Still, the appearance of the nine-dash line — or the friendly themes of “Abominable” — have found a generally approving audience in China. Box-office sales have exceeded $14 million, according to Maoyan, China’s largest online movie-ticketing service provider.

“Benefiting from the magnificent Chinese scenery and heartwarming Chinese emotions, the movie has broken through cultural differences as the first animated film produced by China and distributed globally,” Maoyan said. “It can be regarded as a new paragon of cultural exports.”

The film has scored 7.5 out of 10 on the Douban review site, China’s equivalent of Rotten Tomatoes.

“A good animation. Classic Hollywood story line with strong Chinese characteristics,” wrote a reviewer using the screen name Sikaodemao. “Displaying the scenery of the beautiful motherland makes it like a tribute film to the country. But it is highly entertaining and all the kids were laughing.”

Another commenter, Tang Xiaowan, was less impressed. “Chinese skin, American core,” Tang wrote.

China is a cutthroat market for Hollywood studios. According to Chinese rules, only 38 foreign films are allowed to be shown in Chinese movie theaters each year, fueling competition among studios to make films that will win Chinese authorities’ approval.

There have been several examples of movie producers altering scripts to please Beijing.

When “Red Dawn” was rereleased seven years ago, the villains, who were meant to be Chinese, suddenly became North Korean. In the disaster movie “2012,” Hollywood added references to Chinese scientists rescuing civilization.

Yin Hong, professor of film and television studies at Tsinghua University in Beijing, said political and economic elements needed to be considered when making co-productions.

“Of course China is actively propelling its movies toward world viewers,” he said, “but it’s not always easy to get what they want.”

Blizzard Entertainment banned Ng Wai Chung, known as Blitzchung, from its Grandmasters esports competition for a year and withheld prize money he had already won after he used a slogan from Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. Players and fans around the world immediately responded with outrage over what they view as heavy-handed punishment and kowtowing to Chinese censorship. The topic erupted online, with #blizzardboycott trending on Twitter.

“I will never play Blizzard’s game from now on, unless they apologize to blitzchung and to HK people. Blizzard sucks,” one person wrote on a forum discussion thread called ‘Solidarity with Blitzchung, Censored by Blizzard.’

Hong Kong’s protests have sparked escalating clashes between Beijing and the rest of the world. The National Basketball Association was engulfed in controversy after the general manager of the Houston Rockets expressed support for the protesters, leading China’s broadcasters to pull NBA games and local companies to drop Rockets products. Apple Inc. was blasted by the Communist Party’s flagship newspaper for carrying an app and song embraced by the movement.

China’s Online Army Shows Foreign Brands Who’s in Charge

The Blizzard incident began when Ng — dressed in a gas mask and goggles in defiance of authorities’ ban on face masks — used the phrase “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our age!” during a post-match interview. Blizzard, developer of games like World of Warcraft and Hearthstone, said in a statement it instituted the ban to “prevent similar incidents” in the future. On the China microblogging site Weibo, Blizzard’s statement in Chinese was: “We will, as always, resolutely safeguard the country’s dignity.”

The blowback was immediate. In South Korea, Blizzard became a top trending subject on Twitter with people saying the company “prioritizes money over human rights” and that it is “crazy” and “‘disappointing.” In the U.S., an influential former Blizzard employee, Mark Kern, rebuked the company.

“You screwed up and traded your players in for dollars,” he tweeted. “There is keeping politics out of games, then there is grand standing to appease the Chinese Communist Party.”

Gaming websites reported on protests by Blizzard staff. Rock Paper Shotgun said Wednesday employees at the headquarters in Orange County, California, covered core values cast in bronze in a sculpture outside the offices that read “Think Globally” and “Every Voice Matters.” They also held umbrellas, a symbol of the movement.

The website Kotaku was critical, with a headline that read: “Blizzard’s Company Values Don’t Mean Much Today.”

Contacted for comment, Activision Blizzard reiterated in a statement plans to enforce its established rules of conduct: “While we stand by one’s right to express individual thoughts and opinions, players and other participants that elect to participate in our esports competitions must abide by the official competition rules.”

Activision Blizzard joins a number of international companies embroiled in controversy around free speech linked to China. Luxury brands like Versace, Coach and Givenchy have all fallen foul of Beijing’s demands to refer to both Hong Kong and Taiwan as parts of its territory and not suggest they are independent nations. During the summer, China also requested more than 40 foreign airlines stop referring to China, Hong Kong and Taiwan as separate countries.

“As you know, there are serious protests in my country now,” Ng said in a statement to gaming blog Inven Global. “My call on stream was just another form of participation of the protest that I wish to grab more attention.”

Activision Blizzard has tie-ups with Chinese gaming houses Tencent Holdings Ltd. and NetEase Inc. to distribute — and in some cases co-develop — new entries in beloved franchises like Call of Duty and Diablo in the world’s biggest video game market and beyond.

One player explained how much they enjoyed playing Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, but would be stepping back from it and joining the boycott.

“I hit level 45 tonight so when I read the news I was extremely sad,” the person wrote. “I can put up with a lot, but if it’s someone’s freedom or my money, I will gladly give up my favorite game so that others can have the same freedoms I enjoy.”

For example, the show’s 200th episode was a two-parter all about showing the prophet Muhammad. Even talking about showing an image of Muhammad was too much for Comedy Central who have pulled the episode as if it had Michael Jackson in it.

Now the thing you can’t do is make fun of China or their President for Life, Winnie Jinpooh, who changed Chinese law to make himself President for Life. Yeah, seriously, the guy is anti-Democratic even by Chinese standards.

But China has a lot of money, and big American corporations would like some of that money, please. They will basically do anything to get that money. Like, you know how Marvel is always taking about how woke they are but any reference to any character being anything other than 100% straight has been meticulously cut from their movies, aside from a character who doesn’t even have a name in Endgame? That’s because China has rules about depicting homosexuality and Disney cares way, way more about Chinese money than American values.

This was the topic of last week’s episode of South Park, ‘Band in China’. Stan forms a band and his label is constantly giving him notes about what he can and can’t say to be successful in China and Randy flies to China to try to sell weed, ending up in prison with Winnie the Pooh. If you’re curious, China banned all references to the beloved children’s character because protestors once claimed President Xi Jinping looked like Winnie the Pooh.

They also banned last week’s episode of South Park, surprise surprise. To put what happened next into perspective, two other major brands bent over and kissed China’s ass just today.

First was Blizzard Entertainment, makers of Hearthstone and World of Warcraft.

That’s right, Blizzard took down the video from a major tournament because a player from Hong Kong, who won, used his platform to call for independence for Hong Kong. It also did not allow players from Taiwan to use the Taiwan flag.

Then there was the NBA. There aren’t even any NBA teams in China, but they’re still licking that Chinese boot. The GM of the Houston Rockets, Daryl Morey, made a tweet supporting the Hong Kong protestors which was deleted by the morning and he was almost fired by the Rockets. Morey tweeted an apology, presumably with a metaphorical gun to his head.

Which brings us back to South Park, who tweeted their own apology.

It reads:

OFFICIAL APOLOGY TO CHINA FROM TREY PARKER AND MATT STONE.

“Like the NBA, we welcome the Chinese censors into our homes and into our hearts. We too love money more than freedom and democracy. Xi doesn’t look just like Winnie the Pooh at all. Tune into our 300th episode this Wednesday at 10! Long live the Great Communist Party of China! May this autumn’s sorghum harvest be bountiful! We good now China?”

I told you they don’t like being told what to do. And unlike much, much richer people, Parker and Stone aren’t afraid to tell a huge market to fuck off if they can’t be free to do what they want to do.

In conclusion, free Tibet and fire Colin Kaepernick.

The highly controversial Season 23 episode, Band in China, premiered last Wednesday, Oct. 2, and less than a week later was banned in China (no pun intended), according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Most traces of the much-beloved series have now been erased from the Chinese web, with clips, episodes and even online discussion threads or social media posts relating to South Park being taken down.

Why, some might ask? Because Band in China heavily mocks not just the state of Hollywood, but China’s censorship standards, too.

The premise of the Parker-directed episode suggests that major film production companies, namely Disney, will go to great lengths to censor blockbuster films in order to avoid offending the Chinese government and subsequently earn the international market.

In the episode, Randy Marsh, one of South Park’s main characters, sets off to China in hopes of expanding his marijuana business. Along the way, he meets a variety of Disney characters, all travelling to the communist country with aims of striking a deal with the Chinese government.

One scene depicts Mickey Mouse watching closely over a number of other beloved Disney icons and Marvel superheroes while he encourages them to entertain the local authorities and earn their trust.

Because he enters the country with marijuana, Randy is quickly thrown into jail, where he meets a locked up and miserable Winnie the Pooh.

Pooh bear has been aggressively censored in China since the election of Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2012. The reason? Over the years, the 66-year-old leader has been popularly compared to the cartoon bear on various social media platforms.

Meanwhile, Stan, Kenny, Butters and Jimmy form a death metal band at home in South Park. After becoming international stars, they’re offered a film deal. The script, however, needs to be continuously revised in order for the band, Crimson Dawn, to appeal to the Chinese government.

In response to the ban, Parker and Stone issued an official statement to South Park’s Twitter page.

The post, marked as an “apology,” read “Like the NBA, we welcome the Chinese censors into our homes and into our hearts. We too love money more than freedom and democracy. Xi doesn’t look just like Winnie the Pooh at all.”

“Tune into our 300th episode this Wednesday at 10!” they added. “Long live the Great Communist Part of China! May this autumn’s sorghum harvest be bountiful!”

“We good now China?” the creators joked in conclusion.

—

As reported by the Hollywood Reporter, when typing South Park into China’s largest online forum, Baidu Tieba, the following message appears: “According to the relevant law and regulation, this section is temporarily not open.”

Brand new episodes of South Park Season 23 air every Wednesday night.

Full episodes, including Band in China, can be found through the official South Park Studios website.

Today these bookstores are gone, along with nearly all of Hong Kong’s independent publishers. The courageous men and women who struggled to keep them alive have been effectively silenced. This crackdown, along with the many other issues that have brought 2 million protesters into the streets of Hong Kong, reflect the Chinese Communist Party’s aggressive efforts to bring the former British colony into line with President Xi Jinping’s 2017 decree that all forms of media would be consolidated and placed under the direct control of the Central Propaganda Department.

The fate of the Hong Kong booksellers has caused an outcry around the world, with independent news outlets and free-speech advocates warning of a return to totalitarianism. “It’s an attack on the publishing industry from all aspects,” declared Yaqiu Wang of Human Rights Watch in a recent New York Times article.

This outcry is wholly justified. But as a longtime observer of a different medium that has also been losing ground to China’s censors, I have to wonder: Why isn’t there a similar outcry about China’s mounting attack on the film industry, not just in Hong Kong but also in the United States?

Over the years, the U.S. government has often praised and defended Hollywood films as a key component of American soft power—that is, as a storytelling medium that can, without engaging in blatant propaganda, convey American ideals, including free expression itself, to foreign populations around the world. But Hollywood has long since abandoned that role. Indeed, not since the end of World War II have the studios cooperated with Washington in furthering the nation’s ideals. Instead, the relationship today is purely commercial—on both sides. For example, Hollywood frequently enlists Washington’s help in fighting piracy and gaining access to foreign markets. But even while providing that help, Washington refrains from asking Hollywood to temper its more negative portrayals of American life, politics, and global intentions. (The exception is the Department of Defense, which insists on approving the script of every film produced with its assistance.)

Things are different in China. In that country, which is fast becoming the world’s largest and most important movie market, the ruling Communist Party exercises no such restraint. On the contrary, Beijing has a very clear idea of how a film industry should operate—namely, as an essential part of the effort to bring public opinion in alignment with the party’s ideological worldview. To that end, Beijing has been using Hollywood’s insatiable need for investment, and its vaulting ambition to reach a potential audience of 1.4 billion people, to draw it into China’s orbit.

This summer, some industry watchers objected when the trailer for the forthcoming Top Gun: Maverick—a sequel financed in part by the Chinese firm Tencent—omitted the Japanese and Taiwanese flag from Tom Cruise’s jacket. But over the past 20 years, most news stories about the Hollywood-China relationship—for instance, recent reports about the negative impact of the U.S.-China trade war on Hollywood’s bottom line—have been skewed more toward Hollywood’s active efforts to penetrate the huge Chinese market than to its passive acceptance of China’s increasingly heavy-handed censorship.

That censorship is increasing because, in keeping with President Xi’s decree, every film released in China must now be vetted not only by the Central Propaganda Department but also (depending on its subject matter) by the Ministry of State Security, the State Ethnic Affairs Commission, the Ministry of Public Security, the State Bureau of Religious Affairs, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and numerous other bureaucratic entities.

Hollywood has plenty of experience with censorship. In 1915, before the fledgling studios had even moved to Los Angeles, the U.S. Supreme Court defined the new medium of film to be “a business, pure and simple.” That decision exposed movies to government censorship, prompting the industry’s newly formed trade association, then called the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, to create the Production Code that shaped the content of movies from the 1930s until the current age-based system replaced it in the ’60s. Only in 1952 did the high court afford film the protection of the First Amendment.

Today, Hollywood is the freest film industry on earth, but only enjoys that freedom fully in the United States. In most other countries, from the United Kingdom to Saudi Arabia, a government body euphemistically called a “film-classification board” must approve every film, foreign and domestic, before it can be shown in theaters. Thus, Hollywood has been negotiating with foreign censors for as long as it has been exporting films—about 100 years.

Yet for all that time, the compromises made by Hollywood to get films into foreign markets have not been seen as problematic, even by its critics. Historically, the more profitable markets—the ones Hollywood cared about—were in democratic countries, where the film-classification boards operated under the rule of law. The changes they demanded, if any, were typically modest. In authoritarian countries, by contrast, the vetting process tended to be corrupt, opaque, and subject to all sorts of hidden political pressures. But because these markets were generally not lucrative, Hollywood rarely bothered with them. As a Hollywood talent agent once remarked to me, “Who cares about North Korea? They don’t buy our movies.”

China has broken this mold. Simultaneously the world’s most profitable and censorious market, China has led Hollywood down the path of submission to a state censorship apparatus whose standards are as murky and unpredictable as those of most democratic countries are clear and consistent. In the words of a 2016 guide to film producers aspiring to work in the People’s Republic: “China and its one-party government currently lack … clear guidelines and standards. As such, it’s difficult to know whether or not a proposed project may fall afoul of the censors, whose whimsy seems to be determined in large part by the higher ranks of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—an organization for which projecting the image of a stable society is considered paramount to preserving its hold on power.”

Fundamentally, the two parties to the Hollywood-China relationship have different priorities. To be sure, both are interested in profit. But for China, profit is just one goal. Another, more important concern is to acquire enough Hollywood-style talent and expertise to build a world-class Chinese entertainment industry that can compete successfully with Hollywood at the global box office—and expand Chinese cultural influence around the world.

Again, Hollywood has focused far more narrowly on business. And that focus has been reinforced as Hollywood has stubbornly resisted other countries’ efforts to engage in cultural protectionism. It took decades for the U.S. Supreme Court to change the legal status of film from “a business, pure and simple” to cultural expression deserving First Amendment protection. It is therefore ironic that, when faced with foreign governments lobbying the World Trade Organization to curb Hollywood’s dominance of their film markets, the standard American response has been to bluster that film is a commodity like any other, and that to define it as cultural expression is to violate the sacred principle of free trade.

In early 2017, Beijing’s strategy of working with Hollywood to enhance China’s cultural influence culminated in the release of the biggest Sino-American co-production ever: a $150 million special-effects extravaganza called The Great Wall, starring Matt Damon and helmed by Zhang Yimou, China’s foremost director. Produced by NBCUniversal and three Chinese partners at a state-of-the-art studio in Qingdao, The Great Wall was the third stage in a process by which Hollywood went from exporting U.S.-made films into China, to co-producing films with China in America, to co-producing films with China in China. At each stage, the American producers received a greater share of the revenue—and submitted to a greater degree of control by the Chinese authorities.

If The Great Wall had turned out to be the massive hit everyone was expecting, this process might have continued. But The Great Wall was not a hit. It was a massive flop—in China, America, and everywhere else. Since then, the relationship has been going a bit sour. As China has pulled back from major co-productions with U.S. studios, there has been a migration of individual film professionals, including not just actors but also hundreds of “below-the-line” workers (cinematographers, composers, visual-effects supervisors, action coordinators, and the like) into the Chinese film industry—which is to say, into the Chinese propaganda machine.

By propaganda, I do not mean lavish epics about sexy female wuxia warriors, or animated features with cute pandas and white-whiskered sages under blossoming plum trees. I mean bloody, ultra-violent action flicks, in which heroic, righteous Chinese soldiers kick some serious ass, including cowardly, decadent American ass, in exotic foreign places that are clearly in need of Xi Jinping Thought.

The prime example is Wolf Warrior 2 (2017), a nonstop tsunami of gun battles, massive explosions, wrenching hand-to-hand combat, and a spectacular tank chase, which hammers away at a single message: China is bringing security, prosperity, and modern health care to Africa, while the United States is bringing only misery. The film broke all box-office records in China and is still, at $5.6 billion, its highest-grossing film ever. And while the state media lauded it for beating Hollywood at its own game, they neglected to mention that the action was choreographed by the Hollywood veteran Sam Hargrave.

Hong Kong has seen a similar migration. Indeed, two other hit films in the same action genre, Operation Mekong (2016) and Operation Red Sea (2018), were directed by Dante Lam, one of several Hong Kong natives who have become cogs in Beijing’s propaganda factory. Described by Jessica Kiang of Variety as “unembarrassed jingoism,” these films drive home the message that Chinese soldiers embody “every virtue of innocence, bravery, fraternity, self-sacrifice, and nobility, while outside China’s borders, all is corruption, cowardliness, depravity, and ineptitude.” These two films are also quite explicitly anti-American, which should be a clue to Hollywood veterans that their interests as Americans are not well aligned with those of Beijing.

Some people in Hollywood understand what is happening and would very much like to stop China from chipping away at their industry’s hard-won freedom. But unfortunately, the deep-blue movie colony is deeply averse to doing anything that agrees, or seems to agree, with the political agenda of Donald Trump. Another obstacle is general anxiety, not only about future prospects in China, but also about a shrinking and divided domestic audience that is still, despite everything, Hollywood’s bedrock.

Given the stunning technological transformation of the 21st-century landscape, all this talk of threats to films—and books, for that matter—may sound outdated. As moviegoing and reading become increasingly marginalized by social media and online streaming, does it really matter that the Chinese Communist Party is squeezing the life out of Hong Kong publishers and American filmmakers? Of course it does, because the same squeezing is being applied to the digital media that were believed, not so long ago, to be a potent force for free expression.

In retrospect, it seems clear that Hollywood got something right when it pushed to reclassify its product as an art form worthy of First Amendment protection. By embracing the old “business, pure and simple” mind-set, Hollywood has produced a decades-long assembly line of forgettable blockbusters whose titles ought to have been Cash Cow, Cash Cow 2, and Cash Cow: Reloaded. But it has also created films such as 12 Angry Men, On the Waterfront, In the Heat of the Night, and Erin Brockovich, which showed the ability of American citizens and institutions to confront problems and injustices that exist throughout the world. With free expression under threat everywhere today, it is a disgrace that China seems to understand the cultural and geopolitical power of film better than the industry that made these great movies and others like them.

In the trailer for “Top Gun: Maverick,” which came out on Thursday, Tom Cruise’s character can be seen wearing his signature leather jacket, but something isn’t the same anymore.

An eagle-eyed Twitter user pointed out that Maverick, whose entire character and name suggest a fierce independence, now wears a jacket that appears changed to appease China, the US’s current chief military adversary.

Maverick’s old jacket had a large patch that read “Far East Cruise 63-4, USS Galveston,” commemorating a real-life US battleship’s tour of Japan, Taiwan, and the Western Pacific. Fittingly, the patch displayed the US, UN, Japanese, and Taiwanese flags.

In the new movie, the patch now has the US and UN flags, but not the Japanese or Taiwanese flags, and makes no mention of the Galveston.

Now Maverick’s patch has flags that look conspicuously like the Japanese and Taiwanese flags, but Business Insider could not identify them.

Business Insider reached out to Paramount Pictures for comment on the alteration and will update this story with any comments.

China frequently boycotts and retaliates against any organization that recognizes Taiwan or refers to it as a country. China threatened multiple airlines not to refer to Taiwan as a country, and they all buckled under the pressure. The US responded, calling it “Orwellian nonsense.”

Japan occupied China during World War II and the countries still have bad blood from the brutal fighting seven decades ago. China frequently funds propaganda films featuring Chinese protagonists killing Japanese occupiers.

While the US has left the question of Taiwan’s independence open-ended, a recent defense paper referred to Taiwan as a country, prompting an angry response from Beijing.

The new film, a big-budget major-studio effort on a hot property, may have sought to maximize revenues by making the movie palatable to Chinese censors and audiences.

China heavily censors foreign films and television and is increasingly catered to by filmmakers as it’s set to displace the US as the top consumer of film.