China cuts 'offensive' bald pirate scenes

Censors have cut scenes of Chow Yun-Fat as a bald, scarred pirate in the new Pirates of the Caribbean film, saying they insult China’s people, according to the Chinese state news agency today.

Xinhua said Chow’s time on the screen in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End had “been slashed in half by censors in China for vilifying and defacing the Chinese” .

The version of the Hollywood blockbuster released in China earlier this week shows only about 10 minutes of the Hong Kong actor’s scenes compared with 20 minutes in the version seen in the rest of the world, it said.

Xinhua quoted Zhang Pimin, state media specialist, as saying the decision to cut the scenes was made according to China’s “relevant regulations on film censorship” and “China’s actual conditions.”

He refused to give specific reasons for the cuts, but Xinhua quoted a Chinese magazine, Popular Cinema, as saying the scenes were cut because of the negative images they showed.

“Chow is bald, his face heavily scarred, he also wears a long beard and has long nails, images still in line with Hollywood’s old tradition of demonising the Chinese,” the magazine said.

Chow makes his first appearance in the third of the Pirates of the Caribbean series playing Captain Sao Feng, the pirate lord of the South China Sea.

Disney said some of the scenes were cut for cultural sensitivities.

“They weren’t quite ecstatic with how the Chinese pirate was portrayed,” Anthony Marcoly, distribution chief at Walt Disney Studios Motion Picture Distribution International, said.

Censors did not criticise Chow’s playing a tyrannical Chinese emperor who kills his son and drives his wife insane in Zhang Yimou’s The City of Golden Armour.