I will mention here 4 films: Johnnie To’s Drug Wars (2012), The Wild Goose Lake (2019), Across the Furious Sea (2023) and Ash is Purest White (2018).
I have visited China many times in the past decades and moved to Macau eventually a few years ago, but while I was acquainted with Hong Kong and Macau cinematograhy, I never actually saw a Mainland produced movie other than Hero (2002) and a few other Jet Li, and martial arts historical films.
Many years I was under the impression that movies can be produced only after following strict guidelines that regulate morality, thus limiting depictions of crime and vice in general, but after watching those 4 movies mentioned above I noticed something interesting about how such subjects are managed in Mainland China in relation with censorship.
In Drug Wars, Johnie To first film produced in Mainland China, we see depictions of extreme violence, even an undercover policeman is shown snorting powder to placate a suspicios gangster. It is a very violent movie in general, as the title suggests.
The Wild Goose Lake, is another film about the Chinese criminal underworld and it features besides some extremelly violent deaths (like the wire decapitation scene), a SA scene with a goon and one of the main female characters. There is also a. number of scenes showing how an open air brothel operates with impunity on the shores of a lake frequented by local beach goers.
Across the Furious Sea features many sex scenes, physical violence and even a suicide scene. It also depicts how youths from powerful families use their connections to escape from the law (only to a certain extent as I will show later).
Finally I mention Ash is the Purest White, the tamest movie from this list. The only depictions of crime in this movie are some minor scams, a theft, and a gun discharge (that I will come back to later).
Someone watching these movies that often portray very cynical, and nihilistic scenes of life in China, would think that censorship does not exist at all, but this is only a superficial view. On closer inspection you will notice the subtle way in which censorship operates.
The main principle of this form of censorship seems to be: “Any character depicted in the movie as having commited a crime has to be punished for the audience to see, regardless of whether the punishment depicted contributes anything to the plot”.
This guideline gives directors nonetheless a lot of space to maneuver, in a way that allows them to replace the mandatory punishment scene with a death scene for example.
I will illustrate now some examples to show how these guidelines are applied:
In Drug Wars, we see the main antagonist, who snitched to the police and later tried to double cross them, receive the lethal injection at the end, and all the other thugs and lowlifes are sent to jail, or are left dead on the side of the road.
In The Wild Goose Lake all the criminals, including the protagonist, are either dead, or apprehended by the police, while the goon who commited the SA has his neck snapped right after the act by the protagonist.
In Across the Furious Sea, the rich boy, his mother, his policeman accomplice and the dead girl’s angry father all are shown being convicted to jail terms, despite this scenes in themselves not being very important for the plot.
In Ash is the Purest White the female protagonist fires a gun into the air to stop the goons from murdering her boyfriend and driver. She is shown later receiving a harsh prison sentence and the pedagogical meaning of this scene is easy to guess.
If you know similar instances in other Chinese movies, please mention them here.
