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Comment by propercoil | Hacker News Reader

Any insight from a native?

Movie censorship is pretty strong in china -- even movies that have "bad" endings need to be revised before they can be shown there. Although I'm not a native, I do know that hordes of people take trips down to Hong Kong all the time, merely for the purposes of watching movies. All the stories of China remind me of Orwell's 1984.

maybe you should go there... the stories are mostly western propaganda

I do go there, maybe once every few years. Went there 2 years ago. Those stories are not western propaganda. Some of those stories are even deeper than western propaganda could provide. I've heard a dozen other smaller stories from relatives of mine who live there -- it's more telling when you hear it from a first person perspective. There are lots of news stories that never even make it out of the country.

if random relatives know these stories they are hardly covered up.

Heaps of chinese news doesn't make it out of the country, because it's written in chinese, or published in Chinese (only) news outlets. It's not a cover up.

It's not that the stories are western propaganda, it is that China is a really big place, and there is no uniform system of oppression, nor of censorship. Really, this is not much different from the USA, where laws can vary widely between states: I carry a pocket knife around in the state where I live, but I was nearly imprisoned for carrying that same knife in New York City when I visited family there. Likewise with China; in some regions, the citizens are more oppressed than in others.

From a Bayesian perspective, it is unlikely that the broadcasting of V conveyed any nontrivial hints, given that the authority in this country has little known records for releasing a signal through CCTV-6(, the Movie Channel of CCTV,) before any changes in ideology, since the first day CCTV-6 began broadcasting.

If a critique essay to this movie appeared in one of the newspapers with official backgrounds, it would be a totally different story.

Not about V for Vendetta, but my when my wife saw Animal Farm for the first time a couple of weeks ago she thought it was pretty accurate.

V can be interpreted any way you want depending on who you think the bad guys are. The Chinese government was established by revolutionaries after all.

Orwell had direct experience of Soviet-directed communist repression in Spain as a member of Trotsky-influenced POUM:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homage_to_Catalonia

However all governments are established by a revolution of some form or another.

Um... What about Australia? Canada? Barbados?

At least a dozen former British colonies established their independence gradually and peacefully, with the willing cooperation of the UK. No fighting, animosity, or anything that could be remotely considered a "revolution".

(Now of course, not ALL former colonies separated peacefully: India, The United States, etc. But there are plenty of examples on both sides.)

And how about Iceland?

You're counting country numbers instead of population numbers. China, India, and the US are all high-pop places, each supported by a major river system.

Tell that to Canada.

Anyone who is "shocked" already saw this film via torrent years ago.

Anyone who didn't know V before won't care anyway.

it's a meh exaggerated by social media.

It's the censorship lift that shocks (as in 'surprises', not 'offends') people, not the film itself.

Yeah, to put this in a USA perspective, it would be like ABC/CBS showing a single naked female breast on primetime TV and being "okay" with it. Usually someone would be fired for that...

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