Many fans were surprised by the elimination, several minutes compared to the original version, when they went to see the special on one of the three official platforms that has the emotional meeting.
Not even ‘Friends ‘ manages to avoid censorship in China. The Asian giant censored the meeting of the six protagonists that HBO Max broadcast in the United States, eliminating the scenes in which BTS, Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and fans who belong to the LGBT community appear, in addition to other sequences that it considered “obscene ”.
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Many fans were surprised by the removal, several minutes from the original version, when they went to see the special on one of the three official platforms that the meeting has (iQiyi, Youku from Alibaba and Tencent Video). The reason for suppressing the scenes in which these artists appeared is because they had some conflict or misunderstanding with China.
In October last year, several Chinese nationalists criticized BTS because they considered that the K-Pop band had “insulted” their nation by not mentioning the sacrifices of Chinese soldiers in the Korean War in an acceptance speech of some awards that celebrated international relations between the United States and South Korea and had nothing to do with China.
In the case of Lady Gaga , the singer and actress, she was declared persona non grata in 2016 in China after she met with the Dalai Lama , with whom she spoke about compassion and harmony. Beijing considers the Nobel Peace Prize a “dangerous separatist.”
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The Chinese government and media criticism of Justin Bieber come from 2014, for having photographed in the controversial Yasukuni war shrine, in Tokyo, which honors the fallen of the Japanese side in World War II, along with other victims of the conflict. warlike. In 2017, the Beijing Municipal Office formally banned him from performing in the country, citing “a series of bad behaviors” by the artist.
On the other hand, China has always vetoed any information, as well as any movie or television series, with an LGBT theme. For this reason, the fragments in which fans of the collective spoke of the series were eliminated, such as the case of a German follower who declared that he wanted to “have hair like Jennifer Aniston ” or that of another fan who appeared with his girlfriend in front the camera, stating that, “like all the Chandlers”, she too found her Monica.
In addition, the platforms also suppressed scenes that they considered “in bad taste” such as the one in which Joey appears in his underpants when he opens his robe (showing that he was wearing a photo of Ross pasted on the front of his underwear) or another classic sequence in the Monica told how Chandler and Joey helped her, she suffered a serious jellyfish sting and the help was urinating on her.
The censorship of the scenes has not been uniform between the three platforms. The uncensored version lasted 1:43, while the iQiyi version had a footage of 01:37:54, Tencent Video’s was up at 01:39:23 and Youku’s was the one that censored the least, at 01 : 40: 16. Subsequently, the versions of Tencent and Youke were adapted to censor the same minutes as iQiyi.
The censorship has not sat well at all and many followers have expressed it on social networks, despite the fact that it was risky to openly criticize. “Are we going back to the isolationist Qins dynasty, have we closed ourselves off from the world?” Criticized a fan on the Weibo platform, Variety reported.
On the other hand, these cuts have been supported by a good part of the population, considering that anyone “who defames China” should be censored . Many fans in the country, tired of censorship, chose to illegally download the original version of HBO Max , others turned to the Bilibili platform, which managed to launch the special uncensored.
