An incident lately indicates film censorship may come from not only government, but also audiences. A famous Chinese actress, Wei Zhao’s new film, No Other Love (Mei You Bie De Ai), was boycotted by netizens when they caught a leading actor with different political opinion.
On Weibo (China’s Twitter), more than a million comments have been post to the actress’s account. The rage also went to other relative individuals or groups, such as the account of Communist Youth League.
People went out to show their attitudes by using harsh words on this movie’s discussion page (See original word cloud abstracted from all discussion in Chinese).
As it can be seen from the word cloud, no key words are related to movie itself, instead they are overwhelmed by comments on the actor, Leon Dai (also known as Liren Dai)’s ideology and Mrs. Zhao’s wrongdoing. It even went to the point that she had betrayed her country, because of hiring Mr. Dai.
Mr. Dai was believed to participate in several actions promoting the independence of Taiwan.
So, what is the relationship between movie and politics? How do Chinese audiences think on this issue? Do they choose movie based on sharing same political opinions with the cast? To find a clue, a survey with 30 participants in total has been launched.
For incident itself, 15 out of all participants would watch the mentioned movie, while other 15 would not. The following chart shows their potential behaviours for seeking agreement. All participants have shown multiple respects towards others, and most of them have chosen not to persuade others. When being asked for reason, only one person was afraid of getting into trouble.
As for people with different opinions, participants tend to feel indifferent, while people choosing not to watch the movie slightly feel more frustrated and pitiful.
Generally speaking, would movie casts’ political opinion affects participants' choice on movie?
Half of them say no. While 11 people claim they would avoid a movie with different opinions, 4 people think that various political opinions encourage them to watch a movie.
Long before this incident, there was a saying that prevails on Weibo: "no idol in front of the country".
What are participants' attitudes towards this statement? Slightly more of them choose to disagree, while only 4 people express complete support. Other opinions include ‘despicable political blockade’, ‘the Earth is a big country’ and ‘I don’t mind’.
For a closer look on participants' attitude towards stars with different political opinions, 3 separate questions have been raised.
The result shows that their acceptance varies on particular regions, that when compared to Xinjiang and Tibet, they are less strictly concerned about Taiwan issue.
Most participants think people must love the country, and they do love their country. A noteworthy point is that their attitudes towards these questions have little relation to their political identities.
‘Keyboard hero’ is a popular saying on Chinese social networks, referring to people only do lip service online. Unfortunately, this is also likely to be the case with the participants.
When they are asked about how to participate in politics, top 4 answers could all be done, and might usually be done with smartphone simply.
About governmental censorship on movie, only 2 people asked do not support movie rating system.
Speaking of their standards of choosing films, participants mostly focus on a movie's genre and theme, while paying low attention to row piece volume or visual effects. (See more on young audiences’ preferences)
For participants’ demographics, this survey was mainly completed by people aged between 19 and 25 years old, and it has twice as many female participants as male ones. All of them hold a bachelor or higher degree.
The original dataset and Python codes for cleaning can be found here. All charts are made with ChartBlocks.