China: Game of Thrones 'heavily edited', fans say

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Chinese fans of the US television series Game of Thrones are up in arms after an apparently heavily edited version of the show's fourth season aired on Sunday.

With pirate copies of the full version available on the internet, many Chinese viewers quickly realised how much of the programme had been cut out of state-run CCTV's broadcast, the South China Morning Post reports.

"They've cut about a quarter of all the fight scenes, then a quarter of the nude scenes," one fan writes on the Weibo social network. "I guess that's okay if all you want to watch is a medieval European castle documentary." Meanwhile, another person says: "I estimate that they cut about 20 minutes. My first reaction was, 'This can't be!' Then my second reaction was, 'My God, what a mess.'"

The fourth season of Game of Thrones was shown in China just as four other popular US TV shows were pulled off the air. The Chinese media regulator said in an editorial that first appeared in the People's Daily newspaper on Monday it had to remove The Big Bang Theory, The Practice, The Good Wife and police drama NCIS to prevent the "negative effects and hidden security dangers" of streaming foreign programmes.

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