Black actress Sharon Duncan-Brewster was NOT deleted from Chinese Dune posters, paper admits

Times of London quietly deletes anti-Chinese fabrication.

The Times deleted and “clarified” this story a week later, even though it had already been debunked online days before publication.

The Times of London has quietly admitted that a major recent story it published about alleged Chinese racism was untrue. The story has been deleted from their website and a tiny correction published.

On 25 October, I noticed the latest anti-China scare story crop up on Twitter. A think tank called the China Africa Project tweeted the following:

The claim was that Black actress Sharon Duncan-Brewster had been “removed” from the Chinese version of the film poster for Dune. The idea here is that Chinese audiences are racist, and would not want to see the film if they thought it stared a Black actor. So presumably, someone in authority in China airbrushed Duncan-Brewster out.

But the story was flatly untrue.

It was debunked immediately on Twitter by Daniel Dumbrill, a YouTuber who lives in China and specialises in disproving just such disinformation:

Daniel Dumbrill @DanielDumbrill

@EolandeR No they didn't. That is one of the many posters made by the studio and used in the West as well, but as a matter of fact, China is mostly using the version with Sharon present. You could've very easily verified this on your own.

Several other Twitter users in China took photos showing that, in fact, in China they had used the exact same posters as in the rest of the world, except translated into Chinese.

One of these posters — in English, in Chinese and in other languages — includes an image of Duncan-Brewster’s character Dr. Liet Kynes among the ensemble cast.

But several others did not. This makes sense: although Dr. Liet Kynes plays a key role in both the book and the film, hers is not one of the main characters that spends the most time centre stage and she is not as central to the story as other characters like Paul Atreides. Reflecting this, Duncan-Brewster appears ninth in the film’s credit list.