The Great Firewall of China

I guess China is pretty good at building walls - City Walls, Great Walls, Firewalls...

I can't say that we notice the censorship in China on a daily basis, besides using our VPN to access blocked websites (which we are pretty used to at this point). But last week we went and saw Mission Impossible 4 and were reminded once again of what country we're living in and how much control the government here exercises over their people.

So we went and saw the movie on a Tuesday and totally loved it - besides the fact that Tom Cruise has a really weird-shaped upper-body (*spoiler alert!*). Anyway, loved the movie. Some other friends wanted to go see it on Saturday of the same week (at a different theater) so we said, what the heck, let's go. It wasn't too far in to the movie before we noticed that some of the audio was really jumbled up, like it sounds when your CD is scratched or something. At first we thought nothing of it, until of course we noticed it happening every time someone said Serbia, Croatia, or codes. Because we had seen it uncensored earlier in the week A and I not only noticed the jumbled audio but also knew what the original audio said.

Besides just the audio being messed with, I also started noticing that sometimes the Chinese character subtitles along the bottom were different from the original audio as well. For example, when audio would jumble over "Croatia" the subtitles would say, "that place." Or when she said, "The codes, now!" the subtitles said, "hurry!" A friend of ours who was there and is pretty in the know told us that absolutely, the government will snip out pieces or topics that they don't even want their people talking about. So interesting.

It was a really interesting experience to notice the censorship on that level. I know that if we were paying more attention we would notice it in other places as well - which we do sometimes - but we just didn't expect it in a movie theater. Final thought, so grateful that we are from and have the opportunity and blessing to live in a country that provides us many freedoms which are unavailable to others all over the world. God Bless America.