The penalty would consist of withholding taxpayer funds and other government support from filmmaking that submits to the censorship demands of the Chinese Communist Party.
Congressman Mark Green is reintroducing a bill that he reports had been “favorably reported out of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs” during the previous congressional term: the Stopping Communist Regimes from Engaging in Edits Now Act, which acronymistically resolves into the SCREEN Act.
From Confucius Institutes to DeepSeek
“The Chinese Communist Party has worked for decades to spread its propaganda across the United States,” Green says. “From Confucius Institutes to TikTok and DeepSeek, Beijing uses every avenue to push its malign influence—and Hollywood is no exception.
“My bill would prohibit government entities, including the State Department and the Pentagon, from assisting film studios that allow the CCP to censor their films. This means studios under CCP influence would no longer use military assets or get special federal assistance. While the federal government should not restrict film content as it relates to China, it also shouldn’t award studios that kowtow to our biggest adversary….
“The Communist ideology undermines every American principle, from the concept of civil society and the rule of law, to the separation of powers and free speech. Xi Jinping is not interested in importing American culture; he wants to dominate it. There is a reason China refused to show ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ unless the Statue of Liberty was cut out.”
Green’s press release giving the “Spider-Man” example does not mention that in this case, the studio did not comply with China’s editorial demands. One reason, as the Washington Times reported, may have been that “cutting out the statue also would have created more controversy by appearing to cave into the Chinese Communist Party pressure.” (Appearing to?) It’s a good example of the kind of thing the Chinese Communist Party is afraid of, though: any hint of an alternative to China’s totalitarian system.
Often, of course, studios do cooperate with the CCP’s conditions for showing a movie in China. Studios will make changes in obedience to the censors after a movie has been made, and they’ll mangle good ideas when conceiving and making movies in hopes of preemptively satisfying the censors.
The PEN report
A 2020 report published by PEN America, the organization for writers that not entirely consistently promotes freedom of speech, noted that “under Xi Jinping especially, [the Chinese government] has heavily emphasized its desire to ensure that Hollywood filmmakers—to use their preferred phrase—‘tell China’s story well’…. Hollywood decision-makers and other filmmaking professionals are increasingly making decisions about their films—the content, casting, plot, dialogue, and settings—based on an effort to avoid antagonizing Chinese officials who control whether their films gain access to the booming Chinese market….”
The studios’ other investments in China exacerbate the problem.
Studio parent companies have a slate of Chinese business interests. Disney, for example, has a 47 percent stake in the Shanghai Disneyland Park, which opened in 2016 and which cost over $5.5 billion to build.
Universal Studios, meanwhile, is planning to open the Universal Beijing Resort…..complete with two theme parks, six hotels, a waterpark, and an entertainment complex…. The price tag for the resort complex is $6.5 billion, and will be co-owned by Universal and Beijing Shouhuan Cultural Tourism Investment, a coalition of Chinese state-owned companies.
All of these business pressures combine so that, in the words of University of California Los Angeles Professor Michael Berry, Hollywood studios “would be silly not to address the censors. The Hollywood companies are increasingly savvy and increasingly paranoid. Instituting self-censorship is the way to go, especially as the big mainstream blockbusters need China…Hollywood has internalized these self-censorship mechanisms.”
Will Representative Green’s bill, if enacted, have any beneficial effect on all this? Maybe on certain movies, such as those which rely on a U.S. military setting.
In any case, the more consistently the principle of the legislation is followed in every realm, the bigger the impact will be. The American people and our government should not be appeasing, supporting, funding, or otherwise sanctioning and abetting our own would-be destroyers, whether CCP censors or Iranian or Palestinian terrorists.
