Keanu Reeves became the target of a Chinese state media purge after his long-standing support for Tibetan liberation resurfaced following the 2022 release of *The Matrix Resurrections*, the first Hollywood film to launch simultaneously in China and the West. The backlash reflects Beijing's broader sensitivity around Tibet, a region annexed in 1951 and treated by the Chinese Communist Party as historically inseparable from the state, with any perceived support for its autonomy or the exiled Dalai Lama treated as separatism and typically resulting in bans from Chinese screens and stages.

The trigger was Reeves's recitation of the beat poem "Pull My Daisy" at a Tibet House US benefit concert in New York, which drew attention to political sympathies he had held for years, including his earlier role as Prince Siddhartha in 1993's *Little Buddha*. Within months of the film's Chinese release, which took around $13 million at the box office, nearly all of Reeves's work vanished from Chinese streaming platforms such as iQiyi and Tencent Video, including the *Matrix* films, *Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure*, *Speed* and *Toy Story 4*, with searches for his name yielding no results. Sources cited by the Los Angeles Times suggest the backlash is largely confined to nationalist circles, with many ordinary Chinese film fans reportedly unbothered by his political views.