Chinese censorship is tightening every year under Xi, even VPNs are no longer safe to use.
For HOI4, its easy to see how it stirred the censor's paranoia.
Firstly, Tibet is non-core, which is a massive dealbreaker as China repeats the 'historically part of China' mantra
Secondly, Xinjiang is in the comintern, not part of Chinese faction, another obvious dealbreaker.
Thirdly, Taiwan under control of Japanese, Chinese textbooks like to underrepresent the Japanese 50 year rule in Taiwan, in part to maintain the 'historically china' narrative with an unbroken history of control, and in another part to avoid mentioning the contributions of Japan to Taiwan (which is why modern Taiwan is so close to Japan).
Fourthly, the communists always lose the civil war. The communist party likes to portray itself as the noble and destined winner to the war to the hopeless corrupt nationalist losers, this binary dogma has actually weakened in the recent years, with neutral portrayals of nationalists being tolerated in television, but HOI4 goes way too far in the nationalists' favor.
My suggestion is to make the Chinese version of HOI4 different from other languages, buffing the commies, giving Communist cores everywhere, super positive portrayals of Communist leaders through absurd events etc, this will help it get past censors, and Chinese players can use mods to reverse these changes. Paradox can consult their Tencent shareholders for further assistance.
The Chinese community for HOI4 is small, but China is still by far the biggest PC gaming market in the world, it would be wise to do some cheap countermeasures to get psat this incident.
For HOI4, its easy to see how it stirred the censor's paranoia.
Firstly, Tibet is non-core, which is a massive dealbreaker as China repeats the 'historically part of China' mantra
Secondly, Xinjiang is in the comintern, not part of Chinese faction, another obvious dealbreaker.
Thirdly, Taiwan under control of Japanese, Chinese textbooks like to underrepresent the Japanese 50 year rule in Taiwan, in part to maintain the 'historically china' narrative with an unbroken history of control, and in another part to avoid mentioning the contributions of Japan to Taiwan (which is why modern Taiwan is so close to Japan).
Fourthly, the communists always lose the civil war. The communist party likes to portray itself as the noble and destined winner to the war to the hopeless corrupt nationalist losers, this binary dogma has actually weakened in the recent years, with neutral portrayals of nationalists being tolerated in television, but HOI4 goes way too far in the nationalists' favor.
My suggestion is to make the Chinese version of HOI4 different from other languages, buffing the commies, giving Communist cores everywhere, super positive portrayals of Communist leaders through absurd events etc, this will help it get past censors, and Chinese players can use mods to reverse these changes. Paradox can consult their Tencent shareholders for further assistance.
The Chinese community for HOI4 is small, but China is still by far the biggest PC gaming market in the world, it would be wise to do some cheap countermeasures to get psat this incident.
