Advertisement
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War trailer gets censored in China over Tiananmen Square crackdown footage
- The trailer for the next highly anticipated Call of Duty game shows a second-long clip of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests
- Call of Duty got into trouble in China in 2012 after showing a fictional World War II bombing of Beijing
Reading Time:2 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
0

The next highly anticipated game in the hit Call of Duty franchise isn’t even out yet, but its new trailer is already being censored in China.
The new trailer for Activision’s Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War that dropped last week is based around segments of a 1984 interview with former Soviet KGB informant and defector Yuri Bezmenov. His comments on Russian Cold War subversion strategies act as narration over real footage from conflicts of the era.
One of the clips shows protesters in Beijing on top of an armoured vehicle during the student-led protest in 1989 that culminated in a brutal military crackdown.
The clip is just shy of a second long, but some eagle-eyed viewers were quick to recognise it. That was enough to get the censors to roll in.
On local video platforms like Bilibili, the clip of the protests was soon replaced with a black screen or other footage. Then Activision released a one-minute version of the original two-minute trailer without the scene.
Showing the highly sensitive event was enough to get people buzzing about the game online. The offending clip was also shared on social platform Weibo last Thursday. To reference the clip without being censored, users started using alternative terms like “01:05”, the time the scene appears in the video.
Advertisement