A Chinese corpse bride

"The Cremator" directed by the Chinese Peng Tao 

Censorship, in some form or the other, exists in all countries, with perhaps the exception of culturally progressive nations of Europe and Scandinavia.

Chinese authorities censor films on grounds of violence, sex and nudity. However, films like Peng Tao's "The Cremator" also risk being censored and/or banned because of its subject matter.

"The Cremator" explores the real-life Chinese custom of “ghost marriages — matchmaking for the dead to ward off loneliness in the afterlife, a practice that still occurs in some parts of rural China. The movie follows an unassuming undertaker who helps facilitate ghost marriages for cash in his poor town. When he faces a terminal illness, the undertaker makes his own ghost bride from a pretty young woman’s unclaimed corpse. But real life interjects in the form of his dead bride-to-be’s living sister, and the undertaker has a strange relationship with the sister.

It's love at first sight for me personally when I read of such stories. But for Chinese authorities, the film may be foregrounding superstition that has always been a particular anathema of the Communist establishment in China.

Here is a review of the film, and here is a list of films banned over the years, for a variety of reasons, in the United States.

Subwordsion

I recall reading something on censorship and artistic expression by J.M. Coetzee. He was using a poem where an African National Congress member couldn't directly report on the death from torture, suffered by a fellow ANC activist, during South Africa's regime of Apartheid. 

Ingeniously, he composed a poem on how the prisoner, repeatedly slipped and fell on a bar of soap, till he fell and broke into smithereens, inside his prison cell.

Words, Coetzee says, can help bypass censorship and yet evoke the truth that the writer wishes to convey.

Popular Chinese novelist, Yu Hua, uses a similar linguistic tactic in China in Ten Words, his nonfiction accounting of modern day China.

The ten words are as follows: people, leader, reading, writing, revolution,disparity, grassroots, copycat, bamboozle and Lu Xun (an influential early 20th-century writer). None of these words are banned in China, but they are used subversively by the writer. 

Here is an instance of that indirect journey of subversion that a word like "people" makes in Hua's book: It's a positive word used by the Chinese state very frequently to suggest complete democracy and "people's power." Hua, co opts the word from the bureaucratic lexicon and creates an occasion to discuss the Tienanmen Square incident of June 4, 1989, when the Chinese army opened fire on unarmed pro-democracy demonstrators.