The Big [Censored] Theory

It absolutely backfires. No one is as successful at selling US culture as the US, except all those countries that censor exported/imported US culture.

This seems untrue. Do more than a fraction of a percent of Chinese people watch the uncensored versions of things?

Not on a regular basis, perhaps.

The glitches serve to remind them daily that their government is manipulating them.

The dilemma that China's leaders have is that they need an educated workforce, capable of logical and critical thinking, but they can't stop that workforce thinking critically outside work.

I have no idea, but I also doubt that's the most effective metric for determining people buying/being sold, US culture. I think you'd have to sample a wide range of metrics to gauge how well US culture has been sold around the world. You'd also have to come up with a good definition of culture. I'm using a very generous one here, including pop-culture, tech-culture and lots of what many people might consider trash. But yea, notwithstanding all of that, I still support the notion that US culture has been sold effectively throughout the world by the US and those who have tried to censor it.

Agreed. It's easy to handwave it off. Americans churn out propaganda and inject it into every form of media it can. Similar to preservatives, some media is more nitrate than meat. China cuts it out because it says it's unhealthy to consume. China can do that overtly in it's culture war because it has never guaranteed not to.

Isn't China's movie editing more like adding a slideshow at the end that says "and then every character was arrested by the police, reeducated, and is now in a heterosexual nuclear family with 2.5 children"?

https://twitter.com/ZeyiYang/status/1561565205942919170

I'm itching to give a counterexample, but that'll ignite a flame war. I'll cowardly insinuate it instead: you know the country I'm talking about.

> The glitches serve to remind them daily that their government is manipulating them.

I suspect that the vast majority of Chinese viewers barely notice, or just assume that there was some sort of problem with the source material when it was imported into their country. Most probably don't make the connection that portions have been censored, because this is just what they've grown up with, and seems normal.

I think you both under- and over-estimate Chinese people in this regard. Certainly they are well-educated, but they've been raised culturally very differently than you or I. It's not impossible to be smart and know how to think, but also close off your mind to certain classes of criticism because you've been raised to value unity and harmony above other concerns.

I mean, seriously. I'm American, and the US primary school system is clearly designed half as day care, and half as a factory for teaching US citizens how to think like US citizens are "supposed" to think.

We also forget that, in the mid and late 1900s (or, like many of us, just weren't born yet), many (though not all) of the same kinds of censorship were present in American TV, and to some extent movies as well.

I do find the Chinese version to be more insidious (and more dangerous, given current surveillance and content-blocking technology), and much of it probably is, but I do think some of it is just unconscious nationalism and "othering" on my part, as much as I try to stamp out that kind of thinking in myself.

I don't think that logical and critical thinking protects against being fine with living in an authoritarian state, or even being in favor of authoritarianism.

I'm Chinese, I want to say that the uncensored version is still circulating in Baidu's network disk.