And they take it very seriously indeed. In November, Disney+ subscribers in Hong Kong noticed that an episode was missing from season 16 of The Simpsons: the one in which Homer, Marge and family visit Tiananmen Square in Beijing, where they find a sign that reads: “On this site in 1989, nothing happened.” So now, within China, the episode didn’t happen either.

But for glancing, even accidental offences, the consequences can be equally brutal and swift. Monster Hunter, a blockbuster video-game adaptation distributed by Tencent themselves, was pulled overnight because of a poorly translated pun on “knees” and “Chinese”: some social media users wrongly took it as a reference to the highly un-PC playground chant “Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees”, and an online outcry ensued. On the Friday night of Monster Hunter’s release, it accounted for a quarter of all film screenings in China: by Saturday, its market share had shrunk to 0.7 per cent, and the film was pulled shortly thereafter. A new cut without the controversial line was hurriedly prepared but went unreleased, while online mentions of the film were scrubbed.

As I’ve written before, Hollywood has been playing along with this absurd and shameful system for years. Potentially troublesome portions of films as innocuous as Pirates of the Caribbean and Bohemian Rhapsody are cut without a care, all to ease these products’ passage into a potentially lucrative market.

But as diplomatic relations deteriorate, the rewards are less certain than ever. Currently, the likes of Black Widow, Spider-Man: No Way Home and even the overtly internationally minded Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings remain unapproved for release. (In what feels suspiciously like geopolitical trolling, the only US film to have been rubber-stamped for months is Woody Allen’s A Rainy Day in New York.)