Censorship in Taiwan Film Industry (Industry)

Until 1982 all films were vetted by GIO’s film division, and this process had been very strict, similar to the centralised precensorship that still prevails in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). If a script was deemed unsuitable to pass the necessary ideological requirements, it could not be approved for production. However, in 1983 the rules were relaxed, and films could go into production without prior consultation with the government.

Historically, all CMPC’s projects had to be approved by KMT’s “culture work committee” before they could begin production. [Taiwan a Treasure Island, 262] To pass the studio’s conservative line of ideology, these assistants would prepare “creative” proposals that disguised the real intent of the films. For instance, Growing Up is about a boy who turns to juvenile delinquency and drives his mother to suicide. He fails to live up to her ambition for him to go to college, and goes to military school instead. Xiao Ye wrote this up as a pitch that promotes the military academy as a place to straighten out wayward boys. The Sandwich Man was represented to CMPC as a picture celebrating the humanist philosophy of founding father Dr. Sun Yat-sen, from which was derived the basics of KMT nation-building. Each segment in this three-part omnibus supposedly depicted the long-suffering nobility of ordinary citizens of Taiwan. In contrast to their proposals, the two films turned out much differently in the flesh.

The film censorship established in the 1930s by KMT’s wartime cultural commissions was one of extreme propriety and almost fundamentalist proscription. Stipulations were enforced at the scriptwriting stage and included the following: no depictions of Chairman Mao, the PRC flag, or the PRC anthem, even within an anti-Communist story; no more than 30 percent of dialogue could be in dialects or foreign languages; villains could not be killed off before they had a chance to repent; no ear waxing, nose-picking, or other backward behaviors; superstitious practices and the supernatural were to be discouraged; authorities had to be properly depicted, e. g., no policeman’s wife could be licentious, and so on.
The film censorship bureau would like to have sustained its strict pedagogical control of content for as long as possible; yet a civil society in the making and pragmatic considerations of market differentiation led the KMT government to gradually relax film censorship in the early 1980s.


Individual Cases:
The Sandwich Man:
CMPC’s political watchdogs had been alarmed by the strong reaction against 'The Taste of Apples' by conservative journalists. In response, one of the stipulations CMPC required was to insert titles clearly marking the historical period in which the stories take place. Thus the film, in the segment by Hou Hsiao-hsien, opens with the words '1962. Zhuqi'. Zhuqi is a small, south-central town near Mt. Ali (Ali Shan), in a forest reserve developed by the Japanese. These titles mark a diegetic separation of the film from the realities of contemporary Taiwan in the 1980s.






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