A post claiming Chinese government censored reviews on movies was upvoted earlier, so I looked into it and here is the proof that was not the case.

First, I wanted to find the most popular Chinese movie review websites. This is simply achieved by going to the Chinese search engine baidu.com and type in "电影评分" which means "movie scores"

The number one website that came up was Douban, which was mentioned in the article. The second result was a link to a post asking how trustworthy are the reviews. the other website mentioned in the article , Maoyan, did not make it to the first few pages of the search result.

So lets quickly compare the reviews from western releases vs local chinese releases that are currently in theatres,

Top western releases:

1. Moana - 7.7
2. Sully - 8.3
3. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them -8.0
4. I.T. - 5.3
5. Your Name (Japanese Anime) - 8.5

Top Chinese Releases:

1. RailRoad Tigers - 4.7
2. Some like it Hot - 6.4
3. Cherry Returns - 5.3
4. The Great Wall - 4.9
5. Hacksaw Ridge - 8.8

A quick glance shows us that Chinese releases scored lowered across the board vs its western counterparts. It also shows that reviews are similar to that of western websites, bad movies are still scored badly and good ones still have higher scores.

Also if you do a quick search just on Baidu.com, you can see that like the article mentioned, the Chinese government did release an opinion piece on movie reviews, but if you read it, it specifically targets reviews that tries to be funny instead of real, and reviews that targets the stars and directors personally.

Top results included with the government piece are other opinion pieces criticizing the government's news piece, and other articles criticizing the movie the great wall.

So , as you can see, reviews are not been censored in China, a quick search will show you that people still dislike bad movies. The Chinese government releases opinion pieces, but unlike what most people in the west think, that doesn't make it a law. People who are criticizing the movies are still there, people who want to write funny reviews are still there. People also know about Maoyan pulling its reviews, and that's why Maoyan isn't even in the search results for movie reviews.

Just like the west, there are websites people trust, and there are some people don't. It is simply not true that the government has censored all reviews.

TLDR: The Chinese people are not stupid, they still don't like bad movies, and they go online in troves to show that.

Submitted December 30, 2016 at 09:36PM by afkfubagels http://ift.tt/2iMYnHR