Warner Bros. censors gay dialogue in Harry Potter movie for China release
Warner Bros. removed two lines of dialogue about a gay relationship for the Chinese release of its latest Harry Potter movie.
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Warner Bros. removed two lines of dialogue about a gay relationship for the Chinese release of its latest Harry Potter movie.
Russia has asked China for military support, including drones, as well as economic assistance for its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, according to conversations CNN had with two US officials.
The US Navy on Wednesday recovered from the bottom of the South China Sea the wreckage of a US military stealth fighter jet that crashed into the deck of a US aircraft carrier in January, the US Navy’s 7th Fleet announced in a news release Thursday.
The pilot of a US F-35 jet ejected as his jet crashed on the deck of the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier in the South China Sea, injuring seven, the US Pacific Fleet said in a statement Monday.
In a year that has brought profound change to much of the world, the conflict-ravaged Middle East appeared to be finally turning a page. A diplomatic spree that sought to patch up long rifts bore fruit. Iraq transformed from the region’s epicenter of violence to one of progress, for example, brokering rare talks between old rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran.
When my daughter Michelle was 3 years old, her Chinese teacher took me aside. “Your daughter likely has dyslexia,” she told me.
I paused. I had gone to college in the United States and had a thriving career in consulting afterward. I made award-winning films in English. keen shoes But at that moment, my fluency wasn’t enough to understand what the teacher was saying.
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” I asked the teacher.
This time, her face froze. “It means she’ll need special attention,” she finally said.
After speaking with Michelle’s teacher, I tried to find more answers, but it was impossible. It was the mid-2000s, and internet access was restricted in China. Even if I’d had the entire web at my fingertips I would have struggled, because dyslexia is not well known in China.
When Michelle turned 6, she enrolled in public school. Some kids in Michelle’s class could write 5,000 Chinese characters, but my daughter couldn’t write her name.
I decided to pour all my resources into helping Michelle. She went to school each day and met with tutors each afternoon, sometimes until 11 p.m. It didn’t seem to make a difference. Michelle’s classmates were making fun of her. Her teachers were powerless to help, because they didn’t understand dyslexia either. We were miserable, and I knew I had to do something about it.
Michelle had been born in the United States, and we were both US citizens. I had taken her to China as a baby because it was important to me that she learn Chinese and be raised in my culture. I figured she could move to the United States for high school or college, once her Chinese roots were well established.
Michelle’s dyslexia changed that plan. When she was 7, we moved back to New York.
At first our problems were nike outlet compounded. Michelle spoke the language, but it was Beijing English, not New York English. Her teachers had difficulty distinguishing which of her challenges were language-related and which were because of her learning disability.
Eventually I learned more about special education in the United States and was able to get Michelle into a school where she thrived. Today she’s a confident, happy teenager who just started her sophomore year.
My experience with the American school system taught me that the US doesn’t have the cure for dyslexia, as I had hoped. However, we do have a society that talks openly about learning differences and is willing to help kids learn in the way that works for them.
That’s what’s missing in China. There’s a total lack of awareness about learning disabilities. I was once asked if dyslexia is contagious. Because people don’t understand learning differences, children with them are stigmatized and marginalized. Soon they disappear from the mainstream education system.
The Chinese value education above all else. Raising Michelle has shown me that my culture needs to focus on more than just the volume of knowledge that we give our children; we need to make sure they are creative and confident too.
Navigating learning disabilities can be daunting for any parent. My experience was compounded by my culture. I had to navigate an unfamiliar school system to get Michelle the support she needed, while also learning about a new concept and easics shoes xamining cultural ideas of what it means to be a successful student and a successful parent.
After 16 years of parenting Michelle, I’ve realized that dyslexia isn’t a curse, it’s a gift. People with different styles of learning have strengths that I can only dream of. I’ve watched my daughter blossom into a self-assured young woman who loves to interact with the world around her.
After the Japanese table tennis team mounted an upset against the Chinese in the mixed doubles Olympic final, they found themselves facing a barrage of online hate. Even before the competitors took to the podium, death threats and messages to “go to hell” and “disappear” hey dude flooded their social media accounts.
They weren’t the only ones.
A Taiwanese badminton player was slammed for dedicating his gold medal to “my country, Taiwan.” A Japanese gymnast who beat a Chinese favorite was accused of winning on unfair grounds. A Chinese sports shooter was bullied into deleting a selfie after failing to qualify for her final.
Throughout the Tokyo Olympics, online nationalists in China have scrutinized the behavior of Chinese athletes and their competitors, pouncing on perceived insults and extolling symbolic shows of strength.
In a news conference Wednesday, Japanese table tennis player Jun Mizutani condemned the online abuse that he and his partner Mima Ito have received.
“I’ve been attacked probably more than others, so I have more immunity than others,” Mizutani said. “But that doesn’t mean that I can forgive them, and if I do, they will just move to the next target, so it needs to be dealt with properly.”
It isn’t unusual for nationalist sentiment in China to surge during the Olympics, especially one held in historic foe Japan, experts say. But the unrelenting fervor of Chinese Internet trolls seems to have hit a fever pitch in Tokyo, a symptom of a state-backed rise in nationalism that is showing signs of spiraling out of control.
“This variant of nationalism – it’s more intense, more uncompromising, and more unabashed,” said Ali Wyne, a senior analyst at the Eurasia Group who studies China. Keyboard warriors do not represent most everyday Chinese people, he emphasized, but they nonetheless reflect a citizenry that feels more powerful – and more eager to flex that power – than in years past.
Under Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party skechers outlet has sought to strategically stoke national pride, declaring at the recent 100th year party centenary that China’s rise is unstoppable. This has served to strengthen the government’s – and Xi’s – grip on power, but has fueled intense anti-foreigner sentiment that has erupted in unexpected ways during the Olympics, including backlash against some Chinese athletes for losing and attacks against their victorious rivals.
The online abuse has garnered attention at a time when high-profile athletes have made public statements on the importance of mental health. In China, state-run media outlets and pockets of community members have tried to tamp down anger toward Olympians, but with limited success.
“Nationalism – once that genie is out of that bottle, it can be hard to contain,” Wyne said.
This is especially true in a country where 1 billion people have ready access to the Internet – albeit one that is tightly controlled, said Baogang He, a professor of international relations at Deakin University in Australia. Like Facebook and Twitter in the United States, China’s widely used social media platforms have evolved into environments where polarizing and extremist posts thrive. Government censorship has erased much of the nuance in online discourse, he added, leaving zealotry to take center stage.
A 23-year-old Chinese sports shooter deleted a post apologizing for not making her final when she got a deluge of comments saying that a selfie was “inappropriate” given her loss.
When Chinese table tennis players Liu Shiwen and Xu Xin lost the mixed doubles final to Mizutani and Ito, they both made public apologies as nationalist users criticized their performance on the microblogging site Weibo.
“I feel like I’ve failed the team,” Liu said to reporters after the match, tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry everyone.”
“The whole country was looking forward to this final,” Xu said. “I think the entire Chinese team cannot golden goose sneakers accept this result.”
The Olympic Games hold strong symbolic resonance in China, said Suisheng Zhao, director of the Center for China-U.S. Cooperation at the University of Denver. If the 2008 Beijing Olympics marked China’s reentry onto the world stage, this year’s Games, held amid intensifying competition between China and other world powers, are seen as a chance to show that the country is no longer rising, but at the top.
“The message is that they have regained their position,” Zhao said. “It’s a very unique sense of Chinese national rejuvenation.”
Athletes who contribute to the gold medal tally – considered the most important metric to China – have been rewarded in the public sphere.
Sprinter Su Bingtian, a 31-year-old Guangdong native who has been lionized in state media as a national star, was anointed as the “miracle of the yellow race” on Weibo after becoming the first Asian athlete since the 1930s to qualify for the men’s 100-meter final. Tang Xijing, an 18-year-old gymnast who clinched gold on the balance beam, was lauded by nationalists for using songs from a pro-China, anti-Japanese film during her floor routine.
Earlier this week, two Chinese cyclists wore pins of former communist leader Mao Zedong during their medal ceremony – a gesture praised by branches of the Communist Party, but flagged by Olympic officials as a potential violation of rules that bar political propaganda.
“We are in contact with the Chinese Olympic Committee, who have assured us that we will receive a full formal answer soon,” IOC spokesman Mark Adams said. “But they’ve also assured us already that this will not happen again.”
Even when athletes win, they’re not always safe from scrutiny.
Yang Qian, a shooter who clinched China’s first gold, was briefly attacked for an old Weibo post showing off her collection of shoes from Nike – a brand that nationalists have sought to boycott for expressing concerns over forced labor practices in Xinjiang.
Taiwanese badminton duo Lee Yang and Wang Chi-lin, who beat the Chinese team in the men’s doubles, have been scorned for comments that nationalists see as undermining the Communist Party’s “One-China” policy. A Taiwanese celebrity lost sponsorship deals in China after showing support for Taiwanese players as “national athletes” without specifying which nation she was referring to. An agent for Lee and Wang declined to comment on the issue, saying that it was “too sensitive.”
“In Taiwan, no athlete needs to apologize for losing a competition and not winning a gold medal, and no entertainer needs to apologize for supporting his or her country’s athlete,” Taiwan’s ministry of culture said in a pointed Facebook post on Tuesday.
Nationalist fervor has already become a “dangerous driving force” in China, Zhao said, constraining the government’s foreign policy approach and limiting options for how to improve ties with the United States, Japan, Taiwan and others. And with just six months until the Beijing Winter Olympics, hypernationalists in the country could continue to expand their influence.
“Can this type of emotional and irrational sentiment really serve China’s interest?” Zhao asked. “How far will Xi let this go on? We have to wait and see.”
“Friends: The Reunion” got off to a rocky start in the U.S. with middling reviews for the HBO Max special, and now hey dude shoes comes a report from The New York Times detailing the reunion’s censorship in China. The “Friends” special launched in China on the same day it began streaming in the U.S., only the three Chinese video platforms carrying the special each streamed a version of it with pieces missing. Fans were disappointed to discover highly-touted appearances by Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, and BTS in “Friends: The Reunion” were removed.
As The New York Times reported: “Each missing cameo involved a star or group that had been a past target of Beijing’s ire, and fans suspected the show was stuck in censorship gear…Lady Gaga has been verboten in China since she met with the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, in 2016. Justin Bieber’s troubles with China began in 2014, when he posted a photo from the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, which honors Japan’s war dead, including war criminals from World War II. And the South Korean music group BTS neglected last year to mention the sacrifice of China’s troops when recalling the pain of the Korean War — even though the troops fought on the side of North Korea.”
“Friends” is a sensation in China because an entire generation fell in love with the series on DVD and used it to learn English. skechers outlet As The Times notes: “The sitcom was so popular that in major Chinese cities, it spawned look-alike fan cafes of the show’s coffee shop, Central Perk. Some fan accounts on social media noted that the lengths of each version of the special varied, depending on which streaming site users watched it, a likely indication that the online video platforms had cut the show on their own to avoid any potential grief with China’s watchful internet regulator.”
The censorship of “Friends: The Reunion” is only the latest news to come out of China this week regarding popular American franchises. John Cena found himself at the receiving end of backlash in China after he gave an interview promoting “F9″ and said Taiwan would be the first country to see it. Referencing Taiwan as a country angered those in China who claim Taiwan as a sovereign territory, which is the policy of the government in Beijing. Cena was forced to apologize.
“I’m sorry for my mistake,” Cena said in a video posted to the popular Chinese social media platform Weibo. “I must say now, [it’s] very, very, very, very important [that] I love, and respect even more, China and the Chinese people.”
“Friends: The Reunion” is now streaming on HBO Max in the U.S.
Political and technological problems might sink China’s New IP plan, hey dude shoesbut China could reshape the internet in subtler ways.
China wants a shiny new internet — and you may like what the country has in mind. Its plan promises a network fast enough to show you as a live hologram in a video chat, secure enough to block data deluge attacks that crush websites, flexible enough to easily accommodate Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite-powered broadband and responsive enough to let you drive a car remotely.
But there’s a big problem with this proposal, called New IP, that Huawei and China’s three powerful state-owned telecommunications companies are pushing. It’s freighted with political and technological baggage that mean its chances for success are low.
New IP would shift control of the internet, both its development and its operation, to countries and the centralized telecommunications powers that governments often run. It would make it easier to crack down on dissidents. Technology in New IP to protect against abuse also would impair privacy and free speech. And New IP would make it harder to try new network ideas and to add new network infrastructure without securing government permission, say critics in the competing effort to improve existing internet technology.
“What problem is it the Chinese think they’re going to solve? The problem is they’re not in control. They want to be in control of the internet,” said James Lewis, director of the Technology Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, in an interview.
At stake is the future of one of the most important technologies humans have ever invented. skechers outlet The internet has proved to be remarkably adaptable, growing from a US government-funded academic research project into a world-spanning foundation for communications, commerce and entertainment. The New IP issue is heating up ahead of the World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly (WTSA-20) in November, where allies hope to cement its status.
China can influence the internet even without New IP by spreading its current technology and practices. Some observers, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, fear a “splinternet,” where today’s global network fragments into incompatible national networks.
In the US, the Trump administration hasn’t taken on New IP directly. But it’s been pushing hard to undermine Chinese economic influence and counter China’s effort to lead in technology like 5G mobile networks and artificial intelligence. In a speech Thursday, Attorney General William Barr said China plans “to dominate the world’s digital infrastructure.”
As part of CNET’s focus on China’s place in the technology world, here’s a look at how the country is trying to push the internet in new directions, and how some existing powers are pushing back.
The New IP proposal emerged at a 2019 meeting of the International Telecommunication Union, a UN agency where countries hash out computing and communications matters. Proposal backers are Chinese network equipment maker Huawei — yes, the company whose products the US government is trying to ban around the world — along with Huawei’s US research arm, Futurewei Technologies, the Chinese government’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and China’s three main telecommunications companies: China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom.
Huawei said in one presentation that New IP would offer higher data rates and shorter communication delays than today’s prevailing internet standard, TCP/IP. That stands for Transmission Control Protocol, the rules that ensure network data arrives at its destination, and Internet Protocol, which governs how data is broken up into packets and independently routed across many network hops to the final destination.
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