China's 'Game of Thrones' Fans Try Torrents, VPNs For Uncensored Episodes (scmp.com)

"Winter is coming for fans of the hit television series Game of Thrones, with the final season set to hit screens around the world after a near two-year hiatus," reports the South China Morning Post. There were 96 million views for a discussion about the show on China's Twitter-like platform Weibo.

"But those watching inside China are also bracing for the chill of censorship." In recent years, Chinese authorities have ramped up the pressure on the television and film industries to clean up content they deem vulgar or politically incorrect. This has led to some serious censorship of foreign productions. Recent examples include the removal of scenes of smashed heads and bare flesh from the American superhero film Logan, and the apparent manipulation of a scene in Oscar-winner The Shape of Water so that a naked woman is made to appear to be wearing clothes...

In a bid to get around the censorship, many Chinese Game of Thrones fans have turned to virtual private networks and torrent download websites to access unexpurgated versions of their favourite episodes.
Tencent Video holds the exclusive distribution rights for the show in China, leaving one Weibo user to post "I'm begging Father Tencent not to censor too much, thank you."

Another added "This censored version is not interesting. I would pay money to watch the uncut version."

Comments

Making some big withdrawals against...

[Anonymous Coward]

...their Social Credit Scores.

I am amazed anyone would have the shortsightedness to post comments like this under the current chinese regime. I mean holding views like 'I would like to see more nudity or violence' does not really factor in to the acceptable cultural and personal values that the current Chinese administration wishes to cultivate in its citizens. Perhaps these people are due for reeducation.

Finally!

[rmdingler]

We finally have conclusive evidence why Democracy is worth fighting for: The Shape of Water character is available to us uncensored, and more importantly, unclothed.

Re:Finally!

[AmiMoJo]

Actually TV in China, while heavily sanitized for violence and sex (not even cleavage is shown), is strangely horrific.

For example they have a show about the how great the police are, your basic propaganda stuff. One regular feature is where they find people who where kidnapped as children and who are now young adults, and re-unite them with their families. On national TV. The first time they see their parents in maybe two decades and it's in front of an audience of millions. I guess it could be fake but half of them break down and can't even walk down the catwalk to press the button that opens the doors behind which their family is waiting, and the reactions seem pretty real.

There is lots of other disturbing stuff too. They have one show where people basically beg for money. One guy was there with his daughter asking for money to cover her medical bills. He had gone away for work for a few months, leaving her with her mother. Her mother died and no-one noticed, and when he got home is daughter was unconscious from starvation. Apparently allowing them to beg for money on TV is the way they "help" people like that.

And that's not to even mention the "secret news" that gets passed around on social media, which is often very graphic. I saw a photo of a father holding his son, whose head had been half crushed in some kind of traffic accident.

So actually a lot of what happens in GoT, while more graphic than what gets shown on Chinese TV, is actually a lot closer to what sometimes happens in China than most Westerners would ever experience.

Re:I'm not in China

[Calydor]

China has well over a billion people. Just setting up a market stall in some little village in a province isn't going to provide all of China with uncensored episodes.