China cuts "anti-Chinese" scenes from Pirates film

Jun 15, 2007, 7:31 GMT

Beijing - Chinese film censors have cut scenes from the third Pirates of the Caribbean film because they saw them as 'vilifying and defacing the Chinese,' state media said on Friday.

The censors cut about 10 minutes from the 20 minutes in which Hong Kong star Chow Yun-Fat plays a Chinese pirate captain, the official Xinhua news agency said.

The decision to cut Chow's and other scenes was made according to 'relevant regulations on film censorship' and 'China's actual conditions,' Zhang Pimin, deputy head of the state film bureau, told the agency.

Zhang declined to elaborate on the reasons for the cuts but said they would 'not impair either the continuity of plot or the image of characters.'

The Chinese magazine Popular Cinema said Chow's bearded, bald, and heavily scarred character was 'still in line with Hollywood's old tradition of demonizing the Chinese' and showed US cinema's 'lack of understanding of local cultures.'

The Chinese censors also cut a scene in which Chow says 'Welcome to Singapore' because it 'hints Singapore is a land of pirates and has already attracted protests from Singaporean people,' the agency said.

Despite the cuts, Zhang said he hoped the film would be an even bigger hit than Spiderman 3 in China.

The third Pirates of the Caribbean earned 1.18 million yuan (153,000 dollars) on the first day of its release in Shanghai this week, the agency said.