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For decades, Hong Kong’s film industry has captivated global audiences with ballet shoots, epic martial arts fantasies, stand-up comedy, and shadowy romance. Now, under orders from Beijing, local officials will examine such actions with the aim of protecting the People’s Republic of China.
The city government said on Friday it would start blocking the distribution of films seen as undermining national security, a reference to the official arrival of Chinese-style censors on the mainland in one of Asia’s most famous film-making hubs.
The new guidelines, which apply to both domestically produced and foreign films, come as a sharp blow to Hong Kong’s artistic ethos, where government-protected freedoms of expression and disrespectful local culture have brought the city’s cultural vibrancy. Apart from major cities on the mainland.
It also represents an expansion of the Chinese government’s control of the global film industry. China’s booming box office was irresistible to Hollywood studios. Big-budget products go to great lengths to avoid offending Chinese audiences and Communist Party watchers, while others figure out the costly way that happens when they don’t.
Hong Kong’s film industry is as much a pillar of its identity as food, the skyline or the financial services sector.
During its heyday as the capital of the film industry in the decades following World War II, the city produced very popular genre flicks and sponsored authors such as Wong Kar-wai and Ann Hui. It has silenced international stars such as Jackie Chan, Cho Yeon-fat, Andy Lau and Tony Leung. The influence of Hong Kong cinema can be seen in the work of Hollywood directors including Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese, and in blockbuster films such as The Matrix.
Censorship fears have loomed large over Hong Kong’s creative industries since the former British colony’s return to China in 1997. But fears that once felt theoretical have become eerily real since Beijing enacted a national security law last year to crush anti-government protests that have rocked the country. . city in 2019.
So, while few in the local film industry said they were completely stunned by the new censorship guidelines issued on Friday, they still expressed concern that the sweeping scope of the rules would not only affect the films shown in Hong Kong, but also how displayed. They are produced and whether they were originally made.
“How do you collect money?” asked Evans Chan, a director who had problems checking his work in the city. “Can you publicly crowdsource and say this is a movie about certain perspectives and certain activities?”
He said that even feature filmmakers would wonder in nervous anticipation whether their films would conflict with the security law. “It’s not just a matter of activist filmmaking or political filmmaking, but the overall landscape of Hong Kong’s film industry.”
The censorship directive is the latest sign of how carefully Hong Kong has been reshaped under Beijing’s security law, which has targeted the city’s pro-democracy protest movement but has had crushing repercussions on aspects of its character.
With the communist government’s blessing, Hong Kong authorities changed school curricula, pulled books from bookstore shelves, and moved to reform elections. Police arrested pro-democracy activists and politicians as well as a reputable newspaper publisher.
And in the arts, the law created an atmosphere of fear.
Updated rules announced Friday require Hong Kong watchers considering distribution of a film to look not only for violent, sexual and vulgar content, but also for how the film depicts actions that “may amount to a crime that threatens national security.”
Anything that “can objectively and reasonably be seen to endorse, support, promote, glorify, encourage, or abet” such acts is a potential basis for the film to be deemed unfit for viewing, the rules now say.
The new rules do not limit the scope of the censor’s judgment to the content of the film alone.
“In considering the impact of the film as a whole and its potential impact on persons likely to view the film,” the guidelines say, “the censor shall observe duties to prevent and suppress any act or activity that threatens national security.”
“The regulatory framework for film censorship is built on a balance between protecting individual rights and freedoms on the one hand, and protecting legitimate societal interests on the other hand,” a Hong Kong government statement said on Friday.
The vagueness of the new provisions is in line with what critics of the security law say are vaguely defined crimes, giving authorities ample leeway to target activists and critics.
Tin Kai Man of the Hong Kong Filmmakers’ Federation told local TVB that the industry needed to better understand whether the censors’ decisions could be appealed – after, for example, they ruled that a film could not be shown in Hong Kong due to national security risks.
“All this must be clarified first,” Mr. Ten said. “We don’t want this thing to come out of control, so we start to worry about the impact on film production.”
The new censorship guidelines announced Friday appear to be aimed in part at a specific genre of film. They say censors should give more scrutiny to any film that “purports to be a documentary” or report on “real events of immediate relevance to conditions in Hong Kong”.
why? “It is likely that the local audience will feel more strongly about the contents of the film.”
According to the guidelines, censors must “examine whether the film contains any biased, unverified, false or misleading accounts or offer commentary.”
That could lead to a tougher scrutiny of films like Ten Years, a low-budget independent production from 2015 that offered dystopian tales of life in 2025 Hong Kong collapsing under the grip of Beijing. It may also give rise to the efforts of documentaries to chronicle the political turmoil in Hong Kong.
A short documentary about the 2019 protests, “Do Not Split,” has been nominated for an Academy Award this year, raising global awareness of Chinese oppression in the city. (The film’s nomination may have played a role in Hong Kong broadcasters’ decision not to air the Oscars this year for the first time in decades, although one station called it a commercial decision.)
Efforts to bring other politically-themed documentaries to audiences in Hong Kong in recent months have become mired in bitter controversy.
A documentary about the 2019 protests was canceled at the last minute this year after a pro-Beijing newspaper said the film encouraged vandalism. The University of Hong Kong has urged its student union to cancel the screening of a film about a jailed activist.
The show continued as planned. But after a few months, the university said it would stop charging membership fees on behalf of the organization and would stop managing its finances as punishment for its “extremist actions”.
Mainland China has long restricted the number of films made outside of China that can be shown in local cinemas. But Hong Kong operated much like any other film market around the world, with cinema operators booking anything that might sell tickets.
Thus, extended city censorship would take a small but significant portion of Hollywood’s box office revenue abroad.
For example, “Joker,” a Warner Bros. supervillain from 2019, has not been approved for release in Chinese cinemas. But it has raised more than $7 million in Hong Kong, according to entertainment industry database IMDBpro.
China has become more important to Hollywood in recent years because it is one of the few countries where movie watching is increasing. Ticket sales in the United States and Canada, which make up the world’s No. 1 film market, were flat between 2016 and 2019, at $11.4 billion, according to the Motion Picture Association. During that period, ticket sales in China increased 41 percent to $9.3 billion.
As a result, American studios intensified their efforts to operate within the Chinese censorship system.
Last year, PEN America, a free speech advocacy group, criticized Hollywood executives for voluntarily censoring films to mollify China, with “content, cast, plot, dialogue, and settings” designed “to avoid antagonizing Chinese officials.” In some cases, PEN said, studios have been “directly inviting Chinese government censors to their film sets to advise them on how to avoid tripping over censorship wires.”
Brooks Barnes contributed reporting from Los Angeles.
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