Not over all of U.S. culture. But the veto power is not limited to action movies headed for the Chinese market; we’re now finding that it extends to Chinese-created work about to be showcased within the United States. The CCP has launched torpedoes at an indie film festival featuring the films of Chinese directors that was to be held in New York City this month.
The event was cancelled “after several film-makers pulled out due to harassment from the Chinese authorities” (The Guardian, November 7, 2025).
The inaugural IndieChina film festival was planned to take place between 8 and 15 November. But on 5 November the festival’s curator, Zhu Rikun [shown above], posted on Facebook that he had been forced to cancel 80% of the planned screenings because film-makers had pulled out.
Zhu said the requests primarily came from directors based in China, who cited “personal reasons” for changing their mind about screening their films. Directors based outside China said their families back home had been contacted by the Chinese authorities, a common way of applying pressure to people beyond its borders.
Zhu, who is based in New York, said a colleague at his studio in Beijing had been taken away for questioning by the authorities and told not to work with him.
One of the festival’s venues received an anonymous letter claiming to be from a group of Chinese students living in New York who wanted the screening to be cancelled, Zhu said….
Activists have said that China’s transnational repression efforts, particularly in the arts, have been ratcheting up. In August, an art gallery in Bangkok reportedly complied with requests from the Chinese embassy [after also being pressured to do so by an appeasing Thai government] to censor details of an exhibition that referenced Tibet, Hong Kong and Xinjiang, places the Chinese government deems sensitive.
The term “transnational repression” refers to a government’s repression of people living outside of its own country. The targets are often nationals of the harassing government, but not always. Investigative reports have suggested that China’s activities in this category of evildoing outpace those of other authoritarian or totalitarian countries.
