As far as the delicate game of balancing world power goes, China has been more than a little obtuse in their strategy.
You see, China’s massive population, combined with their authoritarian communism and complete disregard for human rights, has allowed the government to leverage their citizens as a consumer force the likes of which exists nowhere else in the world. The catch is that Beijing is using this economic tidal wave to demand that the rest of the world cater to their every tyrannical whim.
For instance, China has refused to allow Disney to produce images of character Winnie The Pooh on account of jokes being made about the fictional bear’s resemblance to Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
But not everyone is bowing down to the Chinese Communist Party.
Sony reportedly refused the Chinese government’s demand to scrub the Statue of Liberty from Spider-Man: No Way Home.
According to Puck on Sunday, citing “multiple sources,” the Chinese government requested the Statue of Liberty be digitally removed from the film, despite its inclusion in a pivotal scene. Sony rejected the request.
Beijing didn’t want their citizens seeing “liberty” as something grand or glorious.
The Chinese government then asked if the Statue of Liberty could be, according to Puck, “minimized in the sequence: if Sony could cut a few of the more patriotic shots of [Tom] Holland standing atop the crown, or dull the lighting so that Lady Liberty’s visage wasn’t so front-and-center.” Sony considered the request, but declined.
The censorship has been completely bonkers in the past, including a massive change to the end of Fight Club, in which the Chinese version concludes not with the destruction of financial epicenters, but with a written epilogue detailing how authorities were able to arrest all involved, sending one character, (who was a figment of another’s imagination in the original storyline), to a mental health facility.
