Scenes from “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” have been cut by censors in China because they “vilified” Chinese people.

The third installment of the Pirates series has reached China but viewers there will not see the movie in intact form. Censors have cut half of the 20 minutes in which Chow Yun-Fat appears as a Chinese pirate captain.

According to Xinhua, certain scenes were deemed as “vilifying and defacing the Chinese.”

Zhang Pimin, deputy head of the state film bureau, told the official Chinese agency that the scenes were excluded following “relevant regulations on film censorship” as well as “China's actual conditions.”

Chinese magazine Popular Cinema seemed to agree with the scenes’ faultiness, commenting that Chow’s character, Captain Sao Feng, who is a grand pirate of the South China Sea, was “still in line with Hollywood's old tradition of demonizing the Chinese,” showing American cinema’s “lack of understanding of local cultures.”

Zhang did not offer details about the reasons for eliminating some of the scenes. He did however say the cuts would “not impair either the continuity of plot or the image of characters.”

Xinhua reported that a scene where Chow’s character says “welcome to Singapore” was cut because it “hints Singapore is a land of pirates and has already attracted protests from Singaporean people.”