When the United States and China reached a temporary agreement to lower tariffs by 115 percentage points this week, China’s state broadcaster CCTV appeared ready to mark the diplomatic thaw. The network’s film channel CCTV-6 (nicknamed “Princess Six” (六公主) by Chinese viewers) had originally scheduled the anthology film New York, I Love You for Monday evening, according to screenshots of the program guide shared by the official Weibo account of “Changjiang Cloud” (長江雲), an outlet under the state-run Hubei Television.
The scheduling choice quickly sparked a trending topic on Weibo, with some commenters noting the contrast to 2019, when the channel aired films like Battle of Triangle Hill, a nationalistic 1956 propaganda classic on volunteer Chinese soldiers fighting the US during the Korean War, in the midst of heightened trade tensions. “I thought we’d be watching Shangganling for a while, didn’t expect we’d already be watching New York, I Love You,” one internet user remarked. CCTV-6 has a well-documented history of using film selections as political signals.
The celebration of warming relations was short-lived, however. By noon, the Hubei Daily (湖北日報), a provincial-level CCP-run newspaper, reported that the channel had revised its schedule, replacing the New York-themed film with the Italian comedy Welcome to the South (later reports indicated it was changed to Camille). The Weibo hashtag “Six Princess schedules New York, I Love You” (六公主排片紐約我愛你) was subsequently censored, disappearing from the platform’s trending topics. While some entertainment-related individual posts using the hashtag could be located on Weibo, clicking on the hashtag for the main related page yielded the message: “Sorry, the content of this topic is not displayed, below are search word results” (抱歉，该话题内容未予显示，以下为搜索词结果). Ironically, as UDN (聯合報) noted, New York, I Love You actually opens with a short film directed by renowned Chinese filmmaker Jiang Wen and starring American actress Natalie Portman—a perfect symbol of “China-US cooperation.”
