this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2025
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P.S. "Everyone's heard" a whole bunch of bullshit about China. Like the complete and utter bullshit of "social credit points". Let's use some evidence-based research instead, m'kay?
Taobao, the world's largest digital souk, is China's favourite place to buy shit. (It's my favourite place to buy shit too. There's nothing like it anywhere in the world. I've seen a jetliner for sale on Taobao. Or a nest of live Asian giant hornets.)
Here's a whole bunch of "banned" Back to the Future merch from a trivial search. Indeed here's the video itself on sale. Pretty fucking lame ban, isn't it? Let's add some more. Time Child is a movie in theatres now so I can't link you to a DVD/BR but I can link you to a shitload of merch. Here are a couple of older ones.
Oh, and here's Ghostbusters on sale. But ghosts are banned in China! HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE!? How? Easy. They're not banned. That second link is a ghost story (Silk) from 2006. (There's a 2022 movie (The Curse) whose title is a single character (咒) that is also used in a lot of Taobao Buddhist content. I can't be arsed to go finding that one movie among all the Buddhist stuff so you'll just have to believe that it's there. Or not. It doesn't really fucking matter since I already proved twice over that ghost stories aren't banned.)
Seems what "everyone's heard" is utter bullshit.
Is there anything else you'd like to incorrect me on?
screen shots if the links don't work outside of China
This is tangentially related but not intended as an argument or anything. I'm just curious if you have any insight into why skulls get censored in China. I'd rather hear from someone living there than wade through AI slop and propaganda/misinfo.
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They aren't? Not even slightly?
I can get the Skull card game from a hundred different places on Taobao. I have skull and skeleton enamel pins I bought from Taobao. (Some of them verge on the pornographic. The pornographic parts are censored.) I have skull-shaped bead bracelets and a skull-shaped keychain. None of them were censored when I bought them.
Here's a Taobao search on skulls. If the search link doesn't work, there's a screenshot behind the spoiler.
screenshot
Neat! I remember... I think it was World of Warcraft? I thought had to censor skulls/skeletons before releasing there. But if that wasn't the case then I'm happy to be informed!
Well, that's a ban in a specific context.
I suspect that something perceived as being for children will have skeletons/skulls removed for reason of not disturbing them. (How bad is it? When I was teaching here, on my first Halloween I played the movie Ghostbusters as a treat. People didn't realize it was a comedy and were terrified by it. These are students between 18-22.)
But there's no particular cultural or governmental ban on skeletons in general. There may be context-specific bans. (I'm not really in the video gaming scene so I don't know what happened with WoW directly.)
From my perspective it was cartoony enough that I never really thought of it as scary but if you aren't exposed to media like that often or it's not culturally prevalent I could see how it might be good to adjust it for broader appeal. That makes some sense. Thank you for humoring my curiosity and teaching me a bit!
No troubles!
Just as a general tip, though: don't trust press reports. On much of anything. There's a powerful incentive in modern 24-hour news cycles to establish a narrative quickly, ideally a simple one, and then ignore the facts thereafter. Hence it's "China bans skulls" (or time travel stories or ghost stories or) as a simplistic othering "THEM THAR FURNERS SHOOR IS FUNNAY!" approach, even ignoring the geopolitical motivation ("CHINA IS DUH DEBBIL!" in the USA or "THE WEST IS KUH-RAZY!" in China), so you tend to have to look past the headlines and even the bulk of the stories published to find the truth.
And in this case the truth is skulls and skeletons were removed because it was deemed they would disturb children. 🤷♀️ There are similar issues behind the "time travel is banned" myth or "ghost stories are banned" myth or even the ever-popular "Winnie the Pooh is banned" myth. A tiny kernel of truth wrapped in layers of wilful ignorance, narrative-building, and geopolitical skew.
That's exactly why I wanted to ask and why I'm appreciative you took the time to give your first hand experiences. Funnily enough, I've been trying to do that ever since I ended up playing an MMO that has only been launched in China. Was a very eye opening experience once I was able to handle the language barrier.