Guests at China’s flagship film festival this week were surprised to find its opening film had been pulled at the last minute and replaced with a screening of Midnight Cowboy, highlighting the film industry’s growing difficulties with Beijing’s draconian censors.
The film’s social media account on Weibo cited “technical reasons” for the decision, but the phrase is often used as a euphemism for censorship and two people briefed on the matter say Beijing objected to the film’s heroic portrayal of the Kuomintang (KMT) — the nationalists who lost a bitter civil war with the Communist party.
The 800 tells a tale about Chinese soldiers and volunteers battling Japanese invaders in Shanghai in 1937 and the plot centers around the KMT, who fought the bulk of China’s war against Japan.