Kung Fu and Censorship

On my way through Beijing I picked up a copy of the Korean movie Muyeonggeom 무영검 ("Shadowless Sword" in English; Chinese: 无影剑), which came out last year but hasn't been released in Japan. I got two copies, actually, in case one proved faulty (as one did).
Q: Didn't you say movies with swords are never any good? Why did you buy this one?
A: It's the only movie ever set in the mysterious kingdom of Parhae. Mysterious yes, imaginary no. The country was definitely there from the years 700 to 900 or so, "there" being an area that's mostly become northeast China, though it continues into North Korea and Russia. It was pretty lively back in the day. Now it's a great place to go if you want to see a part of China without many people or much economic development.
I bought the movie because people from Parhae were still pretty active in the era I'm researching, though the country itself had long ceased to be. The things people write about Parhae are all fairly dull, so I wanted to see what a more entertaining treatment of it would look like. Maybe something I could show my students.
"Parhae" is the Korean pronounciation of the country's name (渤海). Koreans (South Koreans at least) are the only ones who know or care about its history, so I use their world for it. It gets a chapter in all the Korean history books, as a Korean country that was eventually, tragically taken over by China. The Chinese pronounciation is "Bohai," which is also the name of a sea off the coast of northeast China. Not one of my non-academic Chinese friends has ever heard of the country, and only some have heard of the sea. My Korean friends have at least vague memories of having learned about it in high school. The Chinese government has the official position that everything controlled by China now is part of China's mult-ethnic, pluralistic society, and that includes "Bohai." But they don't care enough to include it in history class. The Chinese position draws frequent protests from the Korean side, who want to make sure the history of "the Korean People" doesn't have any competing narratives. (The two articles linked from the previous sentence use the new offical romanization "Balhae," but the way it's said in Korean is really closer to the old spelling, so that's what I use here.
So now we have this movie about Parhae, made entirely by Koreans with Korean dialogue, but filmed in China. It's one of those visually beautiful martial arts films without any depth, so not my kind of thing I have yet to watch it all the way through. The DVD I got has Chinese subtitles and both Korean and Chinese audio tracks. I was stunned to discover that the Chinese version simply washes away the entire historical setting. Where the Korean dialogue refers to "Parhae," the Chinese translation (both dubbing and subtitles) substitutes the imaginary name "Dongyu (东馀)." The wicked soldiers and assassins should be translated as "Qidan (契丹)," which was an ethnic group that some Chinese identify with and others still think of as an ancient enemy. Either way, a Chinese audience would recognize "Qidan" from their history classes. Instead, the Chinese translation uses the imaginary name "Zhenliu (真留)."
Why? It's not that the plot gives a revisionist version of historical events. I suspect the reason is that a Korean film about Parhae is in itself an implicit claim that Parhae was Korean. Someone on the Chinese side was uncomfortable about that, but keeping a high-profile, big-budget Korean film out of China would have political and economic costs. So a compromise was made: the film was released, but place names were changed. Reviewers and bloggers in China seem to think that "Donyu" and "Zhenliu" are place-names from Korean history. A couple of people managed to match the imaginary words up with the real Chinese words that should have been used, but no one has commented on the switch itself on any web page (including Japanese and, as far as I can tell, Korean). I think it's because no one knows the history very well, and so they assume there's some historical reason why these words are being used.
There isn't.