Lost in Censorship
By Maymay Liu
“I’ve never been antagonistic toward those official agencies. I’ve been feeling my way along.” Fang Li said bitterly in 2007. He had just received notice from the SARFT (State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, the entertainment censorship wing of the Chinese government) that the film Lost in Beijing no longer had screening license, and that he would be punished as a producer - he was to be unfairly banned from filmmaking for the next two years.
At the end of 2007, the SARFT announced
that films containing “rape, prostitution, and explicit sex” were no longer
allowed to compete in film festivals - Lost in Beijing had made it to
57th Berlin Film Festival in February of that year, so Fang Li (wrongly)
assumed that he was safe. But should he have been shocked at this retroactive
castigation? China has no official movie rating system, so all films must be
sanctioned by the SARFT for public release. Directors and producers are
required to submit a copy of the film script to the SARFT and filming can only
begin when this script is given the green light – most of the time, this
involves multiple revisions, which can set progress on the film back by months
(and even years).
Lost
in Beijing narrates the ruin of two marriages when Lin Dong, the proprietor
of the Golden Basin Massage Parlor rapes one of his workers, Pingguo – after
finding out that she is pregnant, her husband An-kun hatches a plan to sell the
baby to the childless Lin Dong. With a story so moored around rape and its
aftermath, the film made a journey from script to the big screen that was
predictably rife with conflict: after an initial viewing, SARFT deputy director
Zhang Hongsen harshly censured the film, claiming that it did not “consciously
defend the honor of the motherland.” It was only after heavily revising and
truncating their work that Fang Li and director Li Yu were able to show Lost
in Beijing to the Chinese public, almost a year after it was first
presented to the SARFT. The version that was finally released in China had lost
twenty minutes of original footage, including scenes that depicted “explicit”
sex and side characters like Xiao Mei, who becomes a prostitute after being
fired from her masseuse position, and had a drastically different ending. The
film also underwent a name change from Lost in Beijing, the title of the
international version, to Pingguo, which means ‘apple’ in Mandarin, and
is also the name of the lead female protagonist.
My frustration with the SARFT’s
characterization of the film as a betrayal of China and its subsequent script revisions
stems from what I see as the growing tension between the Communist Party’s
attitude toward commerce and the part the Communist Party plays in the film
industry - and hence, on a larger and more troublesome scale, in the lives of
Chinese residents. What does “consciously [defending] the honor of the
motherland” even mean, nowadays? Zhang Honsen explained that the film was
censured because it didn’t represent the “real Beijing.” This ambiguous
statement evidences how the SARFT refuses to acknowledge that the world
depicted in Lost in Beijing is very much a part of contemporary Beijing.
Li Yu offered an accurate rebuke: “wherever you shoot in Beijing isn’t really
Beijing, because today’s Beijing is far too complicated a concept.” Indeed, the
film only explores potential realities of a capitalistic society
- and China is now a machine driven by capitalism, regardless of what
the Communist Party may have us believe. After all, Li Yu’s preferred title is Lost
in Beijing, and not This is Beijing. Still, the latter would not be
inappropriate, because Beijing really has become a place where love and pride
can be traded for stacks of currency; it is a place where Buddha’s golden head
is fervently rubbed for luck during gambling; and yes, it is a place where one can
lose sight of what it really means to be human. The SARFT’s - and, by
extension, the Communist Party’s - denial of these aspects of Beijing reveals a
disconcertingly willful blindness regarding the consequences of their own
economic and cultural policies.
Watching the film for the first time
years later (the SARFT’s ban still in place), I felt disturbed by the discovery
that Lost in Beijing, which I saw first in its international form, had
been mutilated for its official domestic release. After viewing the domestic
version as well, I couldn’t tell why the end result was considered more
appropriate for the Chinese audience. For instance, the truth behind the change
in title struck me as jarring. The fictional book that the film is based on has
the title Pingguo, so I thought that the
film’s name, Lost in Beijing, was an
intriguing choice on the director’s part in shifting attention away from the
titular character. I was disappointed to see this fascinating decision reverted
through a bureaucratic imposition laid down by a third party. The SARFT’s
change from Lost in Beijing, which
the SARFT objected to because it contains ‘Beijing’, back to Pingguo is actually counterproductive to
the SARFT’s attempts to smother the blatantly sexual overtones of the film; not
only does it highlight Pingguo’s central role in the plot as a sexual object
(as clearly demonstrated in the domestic film poster above), the imagery of an
apple also evokes the same connotations of temptation and sin in Chinese
culture that it does in the Western world. Perhaps even more significantly, at
the end of the international version, Pingguo takes Lin Dong’s money with her
when she decided to start her own life, while in the domestic version, she
leaves it all behind. The SARFT insisted on this change to prevent Pingguo from
descending to the same level of moral depravity that An-kun and Lin Dong
achieve, which would leave the film on a more positive note. But I question
whether they actually achieved this goal - for me, Pingguo’s morality (or lack
thereof) was confirmed with her silence when the original baby contract was
made. The SARFT’s cuts are plainly shallow ones that do nothing to change my
opinion of the characters in the end. Nor do they undermine the film’s blatant
portrayal of the desolation and greed that form an integral part of everyday
life in the city – the SARFT’s attempts to move the film toward a more
“accurate” portrayal of Beijing were ineffectual and unnecessary.
This is not to say that Beijing is
depraved to the core - it’s just that with the spread of consumerism and
globalism, and the prosperity provided by a booming economy, modern Beijing
citizens are experiencing a rapid inflation of social boundaries that has
resulted in a more materialistic lifestyle fueled by profit. The Communist
Party seems unwilling to acknowledge the fact that its desire to maintain
China’s competitive economic edge causes a subversion of the basic Communist
maxim of protecting the working classes from exploitation – something that Lost in Beijing clearly tries to
substantiate. While the Chinese government continues to push for further
economic growth, it simultaneously seems to be neglecting escalating issues
like stark wage inequality and pollution, which have the most adverse effect on
proletarian citizens. Hence, despite SARFT criticisms that the plot of Lost
in Beijing is far-fetched, there are aspects of the film that remain strongly
rooted in very real and relevant issues. For example, the film often moves into
the closet-like room that Pingguo shares with her husband, An-kun - when their
relationship sours, the mood of desolation is powerfully intensified by its
confinement in a tiny, claustrophobic space. In reality, exploding demand for
housing in China’s biggest cities by the upper classes has catalyzed a
proliferation of luxury complexes, which has, in turn, driven land prices up,
making it nigh impossible for rural migrants (and even the established
middle-class) to find accommodation – Li Yu reflects this palpable frustration.
Lost in Beijing thus offers an accurate taste of the bitterness swelling
in the neglected corners of the city; a spreading collection of pools filled
with dark, stagnant water.
The point is that I don’t feel like films that recognize the
darkness of human life at all besmirch the “honor of the motherland.” Lost
in Beijing is not a documentary, and no one has ever presented it as such -
it is a creative interpretation, and in trying to silence this voice, the Communist
Party turns deaf ears to significant, inevitable
cultural developments in the Chinese population that can have serious economic
ramifications. Not only that, I desperately want the Communist Party to
recognize the fact that as a Chinese person, I love China in all its
imperfections. Sure, it can be corrupt, and it can be dirty, but these are my
sins; this is my city, and I don’t appreciate it being whitewashed. Still, I
retain hope because of the persistence of the very individuals that are being repressed,
who seem to share my determined love: in response to a journalist’s question as
to whether he would refrain from producing such movies in the future, Fang Li
said, “No. This is China’s most moving, most important point in time, and all
of this won’t be around again… How could I not film them?”
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