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Only 20 foreign movies are allowed into China per year. Unless part of the movie takes place in China.

Lots of movies have a special cut, just for that reason.

Modern blockbuster movies are already plagued with hectic editing and an overabundance of excuses-for-people-to-be-making-a-helicopter-landing. But some of the Chinese scenes/collaboration have worked out nicely. I can't be the only American ignorant of Chinese cityscapes. The Shanghai scene in "Skyfall" was one of the most movie's visually memorable images. Maybe "Pacific Rim"'s latter half would have taken place in Hong Kong without concern about the Chinese market (its title is Pacific Rim, after all, and a movie about robots beating monsters has a lot of freedom to be in contrived places). But apparently its popularity at the Chinese box office helped pave the way for a sequel, despite its disappointing receipts in the U.S. https://qz.com/110683/pacific-rim-trashed-hong-kong-but-won-...

This always reminds me that the city of Chongqing has 30m people and most people have never heard of it.

It's closer to 6-7 million: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16761784

Many of the 30 million people who are said to live in the city of Chongqing are actually agricultural workers living in a rural setting, he says.

In fact, he says, the area is so huge it's about the size of Austria.

Hangzhou is 9m in the urban area, and I’d never heard of it when I went to visit a friend there. There are very few points of interest there: it’s a bit like Fresno, only with 20x the population.

I thought Hangzhou was pretty cool. I had heard of it before going because it is famous for its tea. There is a lovely lake and mountain trails for hiking. Cool monastery and other holy places. I took a bike ride out into the tea fields and went to a tea museum too. It's a very popular destination for Chinese tourists, it has a lot of historic significance.

Beijing also. Officially it has 20 million people but less than 10 million are urban. Chinese cities are defined like little states.

When Bond enters the offices in Shanghai there is a Chinese security guard, but the actual office is quite distributive and is just north of Liverpool Street station in London. So does that count as “set in China”

Random trivia: significant parts of that Shanghai scene weren't in Shanghai. I did quite a double-take when bond walked off the street in Shanghai and into the lobby of my accountant's tower, here in London.

Other interesting examples:

Longmire, set in Wyoming, never set foot in Wyoming.

The Walking Dead has moved on to Virginia, but it's still filmed here in Georgia. Everyone complains about the grass "being cut," but that's realistic. It just doesn't grow, especially when there's no rain.

No one comments on how weird it is that, early on, the military firebombed downtown Atlanta to give survivors an edge, even though most of the population is out in the suburbs and exurbs. Torching all the population centers along I-85, I-20, and University Parkway would have given more people a clearer path to defensible locations. I don't care because it was a great scene, but it's weird how people's pedantry is rarely informed by actual knowledge.

This kind of thing is nothing new. My first experience with it was when I visited (and stayed in...it turned into a hostel) Luke's uncle's house from the original Star Wars film. I'm not sure why, but I was very surprised that the exterior of the home was shot somewhere else and looked nothing like the real outside of the building (well...hole, since it's dug out of the ground).

Another favorite of mine...anyone familiar with Paris will laugh at the car chase scene from Ronin where they teleport around the city from shot to shot.

Note that you can buy any movies you want in ripped dvd form in the street, some restaurants or some shops anywhere in China. They even sold it on my campus uni. Its common practice to go there once a week to pick up a bunch of dvds

I heard that you can just download complete movies off of links from Baidu.

You can also "buy" the movie on Chinese marketplaces for ¥10 (~$1.5) and the seller will message you a Baidu Cloud link with the movie.

The DVD shops have been disappearing as more content is pirated online. Progress I guess.

Interesting, back then it was already really easy to use PPTV or other "apps" that would stream anything

Now that's an interesting thing that I had no idea was happening! Do you have any examples of movies that have an extended cut to include scenes from China?

Iron Man 3 is one such movie. There is a rather out of place China only product placement scene for some drink, a scene where Iron Man is seen visiting china on TV and a final scene where Tony goes to China to have a Chinese doctor (played by a famous Chinese movie star) help operate on him to remove the shrapnel from his chest.

All the scenes can be found of Youtube.

The milk product placement was funny. The doctor/nurse scene was just so weird and out of place.

Here's one of the better compilations I've found:

http://www.businessinsider.com/hollywood-movies-in-china-201...

I'm not an expert on this, but I think the China-set scenes are generally included in the U.S. theatrical cut, Skyfall's sniper fight in Shanghai being an example [0]. I did a little more Googling and found there were a few examples of scenes meant only for China and left out of the U.S. release. Iron Man 3 apparently had 4 more minutes in which Dr. Wu gets some time to hawk Chinese products [1]. Apparently, some notable Chinese bloggers/moviegoers didn't like the obvious shilling [2].

There are far more examples of things being cut out than being added. In Skyfall's Shanghai scene for example, Chinese censors apparently didn't like the bit where Bond kills a security guard. The listed reasoning for the cuts are heavy-handed to the point of amusement, e.g. ""Mission: Impossible 3" dropped a shot of clothes on clotheslines in Shanghai for the Chinese cut. Apparently, the lack of dryer ownership is a sensitive issue." [2]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMW4dN5sGb0

[1] https://kotaku.com/why-many-in-china-hate-iron-man-3s-chines...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39m85puOQok

[3] https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/05/18/407619652/...

edit: Apparently Looper, which changed one of its locales from Paris to Shanghai, has extra scenes for Chinese audiences:

http://www.syfy.com/syfywire/the_extra_looper_scenes_y

From this link (http://chinafilminsider.com/foreign-films-in-china-how-does-...), I can tell that China import at least 34 foreign movies per year.

They changed it to 39 a few years ago. That is just a limit, not a target.

This is no longer true, it’s up to 39 now for a few years. The Chinese co-production status is more about clawing back a higher percentage of viewing receipts from the state-owned film distributor.

At the same time European movies had to cut down on the showing of breasts to suit the US market. We think that's kind of amusing. Imagine kids seeing breasts! The horror!

The US market presents a bit of a challenge in that the country is so large with distinctly different cultures. Some parts may as well be called Puritanical while others are more to the Western European mindset.

The parents around my area have no problem with children seeing breasts or other body parts. Scenes involving intimacy on shows and in movies provide a good segue into conversations about sexuality. But, we have a major problem with characters slaughtering one another in gun violence.

The reality is that we simply watch more Amazon and Netflix original series/movies, in which body parts and sexuality are more likely, and avoid shoot-em-up blockbusters.

If The Great Wall (starring Matt Damon) is any indication, be prepared for a near future where Chinese blockbusters will compete against Hollywood blockbusters for audiences.

China is the only movie market which can afford the same budgets as Hollywood. The storytelling and CGI isn't quite there yet but it will be - it's a matter of when, not if.

As a neutral third party, I'm pretty excited to see this clash of east-west ideas

The storytelling (...) isn't quite there yet

Funny comment, since the story and screenplay writers are actually Americans :)

Direction and production mean a lot to storytelling, too, though. It's not enough just to write a good script.

Yes, fair enough, my comment was a bit tongue-in-cheek. Although by the description of the plot, I don't think any direction could have saved it.

Frenchman here, the shortage of butter is partly related to an increase in consumption of butter in China (and the United States as well) but honestly it is also partly explained by a problem with the supply chain in the country. We produce huge surplus of milk every year, farmers end up having to throw it away because of EU regulation, so there's no reason why we should have a shortage of butter.

The actual explanation is rather more boring: almost all butter in France is sold to supermarkets, who negotiate prices once a year. If world market prices are higher, dairy products sell elsewhere instead and French supermarkets run dry.

https://www.economist.com/news/europe/21730877-forget-about-...

So it is not just the government that can cause shortages by mishandling the supply chain. I always thought, it is quite ironic how centralised the food supply has become, with a few supermarket chains dictating everything, as if they were some communist government trying to micromanage everything.

How do you lock in a price and not lock in the supply. You can make anybody agree to any price but if they don’t deliver the goods you haven’t negotiated anything.

During the ‘06-07 fuel price spike some airlines locked in a price and were able to keep decent fares. Others didn’t and added all sorts of surcharges. I couldn’t imagine them hedging fuel prices and not getting it delivered.

I suspect they would also be locked into buying said supply.

Plus, this arrangement probably worked out really well for supermarkets in the past, this might be the first issue with supply that they've faced.

> We produce huge surplus of milk every year, farmers end up having to throw it away because of EU regulation, so there's no reason why we should have a shortage of butter.

Source?

This hasn't been true for decades. There are no milk lakes anymore because of the CAP. Spreading lies doesn't help matters.

There's been a change 2 years ago with the end of quotas [1]

Also, I'm absolutely not trying to spread lies about the topic, just pointing out that there's no good reason for France to be facing a shortage of butter given our dairy-production capacity (and those of our European neighbours).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_quota

No, the reason is the end to the milk quota system and market adapting to the new reality. At first the price of milk plunged and production went down, but then demand for milk fat (mainly) shot up. Butter was very expensive in many EU countries for a while, now returning to lower prices as production again rises. So the farmers are not throwing milk away because of EU regulation, on the contrary, currently they can sell everything they produce. And if they overproduce, it's not a failure of the EU regulation anymore.

They also are responsible for a shortage of baby milk powder and baby food from Germany, the Chinese buying all markets empty. At least that was in the news a few years ago

Australia now too.

More like an opportunity for Europe to earn a lot of money once they manage to increase production. There's still a lot of wealth inequality, both inside countries (e.g. the UK) and in Europe itself (the former DDR is a good example).

But what if the Chinese copy your product right after you have scaled up production?

In case of baby milk powder the alternatives exist on the Chinese market. Even german brands are present in Chinese supermarkets. But after some high profile cases regarding low quality products[0], some people are willing to pay a decent premium for a product sourced from a European supermarket. On the height of this crisis I have actually seen signs "max 2 packets per person" for baby milk in german supermarkets close to train stations / airports. I actually met someone who financed a trip to China by maxing out his baggage allowance with baby milk.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal

Yes, I've also heard about cases where supermarket personnel deliberately mutate the packaging (e.g. by scratching) to make the milk unsuitable for sale on the Chinese market.

I believe the Chinese buy these types of imported goods (if not all imported goods in general) because of a perception that they are of a certain level of quality. The "disruption" would not be copying an innovation so much as building branding of a Chinese alternative. For most cases, it would involve changing the widely held belief that Chinese products are inferior.

That kind of brings that Chinese caviar company to mind. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-19/the-world...

Okay, but what if a Chinese milk company decides to find an international reseller (with its own QA lab)?

I imagine that a lot of "western" milk products already contain Chinese raw materials (e.g. mineral/vitamin supplements), so in a sense it would not be a very new thing.

You can’t trust the supply chain in china. Even if you do everything right, someone will create a fake product using your brand if you are successful. Supermarkets will then use the fake product because it is cheaper, and consumers get screwed.

For babies, bad milk powder can be horrible, many parents won’t take the risk and will prefer what they can get via a verified supply chain, the only choice they have right now is buying abroad.

They’re is an import quota on formula. You can import a small amount for a few days use. Anything greater is regarded as smuggling.

That isn’t true. You can import much more than a few days, especially the way milk powder is concentrated. You aren’t supposed to import for multiple babies, but the Chinese customs agents aren’t going to bat their eye at a suitcase full of milk powder packages.

What is the upper limit. 1 suitcase, 10 suitcases, a shipping container?

Shipping containers go through real customs obviously. Suitcases just go through the x ray machine on the way out from baggage claim. If you have milk powder in half or even all your suits see, they aren’t going to care much. If it’s a suitcase full of iPhones, well, that’s another story.