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Ridiculous Chinese censorship used AI to change the gay couple in Together (2025) to a heterosexual couple
(hexbear.net)
Usually, they only censor the explicit content. But this is the first time that AI tools were used to directly alter the content of the original film.
By the way, the film has been withdrawn from a wide release in China after receiving too many complaints.
*Private company (the producers of the movie in fact) makes decision to do extremely stupid and unnecessary thing for Chinese localisation*
*Media blames Chinese Government for thing the Chinese Government didn't ask for*
EDIT: Is this even real? I am suspicious - https://hexbear.net/comment/6521304
EDIT2: Yeah it's real but the blame still isn't China itself.
Can I just say, that emoji on this site for *looks inside* is really funny in context.
Hexbear be peeking
The dope ass bear has a boopable snoot, and sticking his face through a door like that is just asking to have his snoot booped!
Danger boop
Imma boop it anyway.
If bears not for hugs, why bears so friend shaped and made of cute?
I'm starting to get a little suspicious of Xiaohongshu at this point, they seem to be so determined to prove that China isn't some utopia that they even go all in on western style anti-China propaganda efforts. If their goal is to get people to actually understand China properly, they're doing a terrible job with posts titled like this.
How is this anti-China propaganda? This is openly discussed on Chinese social media. The only reason I post is because Hexbear has a large queer community who care about this stuff.
The title is misleading and completely ignores the focus: that this is a ridiculous bit of censorship by a company, not "evil China" censoring things because they are evil. This is "Rainbow-washing" type of propaganda, the same we saw when Israel attacked Iran, or hell, when they attack Palestine, trying to get people with progressive politics to hate them and refuse to even consider critical support for them on the grounds of not passing a purity test. That may not be how you intended it, but that is how it has come across to me, the title you used is virtually identical to western propaganda against China, though they tend to use words like "Insidious" or "Authoritarian" not "Ridiculous".
Why would you assume bad-faith posting here on hexbear though, especially from a long-standing user who is quite clearly better-informed on China than 99.999% of the website.
The title is NOT misleading lol. This is literally being discussed on the social media. Here is a Zhihu thread (think Chinese quora, one of the most popular social media platforms, though very much lib coded) with hundreds of discussion comments.
It appears that it is you who have fallen for Western anti-China propaganda that somehow all Chinese people are mindless drones that support 100% the government does.
No, we discuss and complain about things on social media all the time lol. You just have to be careful with the key phrases you’re using.
They have trot politics its lowkey annoying. I was talking to a trot recently who started talking about how china is oppressing the global south by exporting commodities and everything started to click lmao
How do I have trot politics? Trots would hate Mao and Deng. I am fully supportive of Mao and Deng policies as you can freely read through my comment history.
I am seriously curious how, after posting for years on this website, people still misrepresent my politics!
Western leftist who has only seen Trotskism, seeing a second leftist ideology: "Getting a lot of 'Trotskist
' vibes from this..."
I honestly didn't realize you liked Deng, though I guess it makes sense because you take such pains to divide Reform and Opening Up from the subsequent periods that you mostly talk about, where you (rightly) ridicule the CPC for corrupt and bourgeois-bureaucratic elements. Is there any chance you could link to a place where you talk about why Deng's policies were good?
You can tell from my comments that I almost never criticized anything from 1976 to 1994, with the exception that Deng screwed up the price reform in 1988 (a legitimate L), which, together with the June 4th (Tiananmen incident) in 1989, forced him into semi-retirement, though his influence remained vast even in retirement. Otherwise I have always acknowledged his contributions as significant.
The watershed moment was the 1994 Tax Sharing Reform, which forced local/municipal governments to seek for alternative (non-tax) sources of income to finance their own operations. This led the Northeast heavy industrial provinces to mass privatize their SOEs, and the ensuing unemployment wave that caused an economic crisis in 1995-6. Two major policy changes happened afterwards: Zhu Rongji ended the welfare housing distribution policy (government giving free housing to employees) in 1998 to unleash land capital to save the economy, and China joining the WTO in 2001 to reverse the unemployment trend.
Looks like even OP is doing this
This isn't the first time. There's been a long running myth in the videogame industry that you're not allowed to have skeletons in videogames in China. This isn't true of course, but it hasn't stopped western companies changing their games for the Chinese region by removing the skeletons and replacing them with something else.
This is caused by some dumbass liberal media producers in australia believing the propaganda that China is anti-lgbt and disallows this and making this adjustment based on that belief. It's caused by western ignorance and "better be safe than sorry" rather than anything the government actually wants.
This is false. The film in question is a buyout/acquisition film, meaning that the importing distributor pays a lump sum for the licensing rights and the original producer does not participate in the revenue earning from Chinese cinematic release, so the purchaser of film rights has more liberty to alter the content.
The other type of film is called revenue-sharing film - and because the producers retain the film rights, this would require the Chinese censorship to list out their demands for the producers to remove specific parts of the film.
Ok but that's still a private company.
Depends on your perspective. All import films are exclusively distributed by China Film Group (中影) and Huaxia Film Distribution Co (华影). Both are SOEs (China Film is state-owned, Huaxia is state-owned joint-stock enterprise) but are fairly autonomous. This film, Together, was licensed by China Film Group.’
Again I encourage you to read the link above (with machine translation) to understand the topic in more detail because a lot of what you’re writing is misinformation.
I did. The link is just a bunch of quotes of random things Chinese people are saying on social media (with no actual links to where they said them so I can't source anything or even trust that they're real). What exactly are you suggesting I take from a bunch of random people online complaining that the change happened? Why does a bunch of random Chinese social media posts prove what I have said is misinformation?
What exactly have I even said that is misinformation anyway? You know SOEs act independently of the state, or at least you should.
Your info isn't even correct anyway so why are you accusing me of misinformation? You're claiming that this film was actually released in this state. It was not released. It was due to be released on the 19th of September and they cancelled it on the 18th of September before the national release.
This is version of the film has in actual fact not been released.
I don't know where the original article you're linking to is getting its information from. Either it's some private screening, a leak, or it's totally and completely bullshit. The quality of the evidence makes me suspicious, some weird low quality photograph of a screen, maybe a theatre, is being compared to the western version with a photograph of it on a literal CRT? Who the fuck is using a CRT to watch a 2025 movie? The more I look at it the more questions I have about it. The fact nobody is citing any real sources in absolutely anything is pissing me off.
I'm getting more and more suspicious about whether this is even real. China Digital Times is based in Berkeley, CA. Who owns this shit?
Edit: From the wiki for this site's owner:
EDITEDIT: AND IT'S BEEN FUNDED BY NED LMAOOOOOOOOO
MULTIEDIT: I'm satisfied that the ai edit is real now.
Again, it’s all over the social media, especially on xiaohongshu (social media platform) and zhihu (Chinese quora) that are extremely lib coded. They are the ones who care most about the LGBT stuff.
The page I posted is exactly catered for crowds like this. However, if you don’t like the source, feel free to take it from Sohu which posts articles from users. This is as mainstream as you can get.
Also, the film has been released in selected cinemas in 20 cities. This is how people have already watched it and reported on social media. No offense but you seriously are misrepresenting a lot of stuff here. As I said in the original post, it is being withdrawn from a wide release due to complaints.
there have been different rules at different times. Magic: The Gathering used to do some variant art for the chinese market but sometime in the mid 2000s Rosewater said they didn't have to anymore.
I've heard other media people say the rule for videogames was you could show bones but not bones sticking out of flesh, so skeletons were ok and zombies were ok but not a zombie with a bunch of bones sticking out.
Video game industry is not the same as distributing imported films.
As I wrote in another comment to you, there are only two film companies that have the exclusive rights to distribute imported films, 中影 and 华影, and these are the two companies that have dealt with the censorship bureau for years. You are making a lot of assumptions about a topic you barely understand.
In short, very few people thought the film would even have a cinema release in the first place due to the explicit content - especially gay marriage and some of the body horror contents. People were in fact surprised to see it getting a wide release.
The best example of this I'm aware of is the Headhunter item in Path of Exile getting a slightly different skin that still has skulls in it in the Chinese version, but they're less clearly skulls. But the game is still a dark fantasy game so there's tons of skeletons; it's always been a bit of a question mark why they even changed the HH skin when there's skulls everywhere else.
WoW did it with skeletons in their chinese version, both on bones+skulls in the world and on the undead characters. Couple examples:
https://imgur.com/a/undead-1smvr https://imgur.com/a/female-undead-MPsE3
This is obviously super false and disproveable of course. I actually posted a thread about this when the recent Chinese Wukong game came out: https://hexbear.net/comment/5288533
The decision to self-censor is coming entirely from the western private companies who are acting either on their own bad beliefs about China or on very bad advice. It's not coming from the Chinese government.
You can make that argument if you want but just realize you're just saying the free market rules supreme and this is a slippery slope.
Next when Chinese capitalist media shows even more bigotted views you can also excuse it away by just shrugging it off "but why would the government ever control the media in the first place".
You can't simultaneously make the argument that the CPC controls capitalists which is the #1 excuse dengists make, and then turn around and say "but yes actualy the bigoted censorship thing is completely laissez faire capitalism the CPC has no control over".
People can cope however they want but holding simultaneously exclusive views should be a red(no pun intended) flag.
Isn't this what the reddit nerds call strawmanning? I don't hold any of those views. I would very much like China to enforce an ultra gay state. All media should be forced to be gay and China should be criticised for not using state power to achieve that. The fact that China has allowed its population to remain culturally backwards and homophobic for so long instead of using the state to push social views forwards is absolutely something it should be criticised for.
I can absolutely hold that view while simultaneously saying "But this isn't censorship by the government".