Excellent. Well done, Trey and Matt. Nice middle finger to China and the hypocrites like the NBA and Disney who do business with them.

'South Park' Scrubbed From Chinese Internet After Critical Episode

12:23 AM PDT 10/7/2019 by Patrick Brzeski, Ryan Parker


After the "Band in China" episode mocked Hollywood for shaping its content to please the Chinese government, Beijing has responded by deleting all clips, episodes and discussions of the Comedy Central show.
South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone probably saw this coming, and to their credit, simply didn't care.

The most recent episode of South Park, "Band in China," has been generating loads of media attention for its sharp critique of the way Hollywood tends to shape its content to avoid offending Chinese government censors in any way whatsoever.

Now, those very same government censors, in the real world, have lashed back at South Park by deleting virtually every clip, episode and online discussion of the show from Chinese streaming services, social media and even fan pages.

A cursory perusal through China's highly regulated internet landscape shows the show conspicuously absent everywhere it recently had a presence. A search of the Twitter-like social media service Weibo turns up not a single mention of South Park among the billions of past posts. On streaming service Youku, owned by internet giant Alibaba, all links to clips, episodes and even full seasons of the show are now dead.

And on Baidu's Tieba, China's largest online discussion platform, the threads and subthreads related to South Park are nonfunctional. If users manually type in the URL for what was formerly the South Park thread, a message appears saying that, "According to the relevant law and regulation, this section is temporarily not open."

The draconian response is par for the course for China's authoritarian government, which has even been known to aggressively censor Winnie the Pooh because some local internet users had affectionately taken to comparing Chinese president Xi Jinping to the character.

On Monday afternoon, creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone issued a statement with a faux apology about the ban.

"Like the NBA, we welcome the Chinese censors into our homes and into our hearts," the statement reads. "We too love money more than freedom and democracy. Xi doesn't look like Winnie the Pooh at all. Tune into our 300th episode this Wednesday at 10! Long live the great Communist Party of China. May the autumn's sorghum harvest be bountiful. We good now China?"

South Park's "Band in China" episode featured a pair of storylines critical of China. One involves Randy getting caught attempting to sell weed in China and getting sent to a work camp similar to those Beijing has been using in Xinjiang Province to hold as many as a million Chinese Muslims for political indoctrination. (While he's at the work camp, Randy runs into an imprisoned Winnie the Pooh)

A second plot follows Stan, Jimmy, Kenny and Butters forming a metal band, which becomes popular and attracts the attention of a manager who wants to make a film about them. But then the script keeps changing so that the film can safely be distributed in China.

"Now I know how Hollywood writers feel," Stan says at one point while a Chinese guard watches over him and alters his work while he writes the script. Several shots are taken at Disney, including a scene where Mickey Mouse shows up to make sure all his employees (other Marvel and Disney cartoon characters) play ball with the Chinese authorities.



The episode's critique has proved especially timely in light of the controversy now swirling around the NBA. On Sunday, Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey issued a tweet expressing his solidarity with Hong Kong's pro-democracy protestors.

Although just a single tweet, from one among hundreds of NBA executives, the message sparked a deluge of criticism in China, where the Hong Kong protests have become a hot-button political issue, with Beijing's propaganda apparatus going into overdrive to shape local opinion of the movement as anarchistic and untethered to legitimate political grievances. Chinese broadcasters announced they would stop airing Rockets games, and local sponsors pulled their funds from the team.

Evidently fearing the financial implications of the Chinese backlash, the Rockets and the NBA have since disavowed Morey's comments.

Oct. 7, 11:30 a.m. Updated with statement from Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

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Strange how silicon valley loves and embraces china despite it being the antithesis of American Values.

Methinks they have more in common than either would like to admit.

quote:

Originally posted by braillediver:
Strange how silicon valley loves and embraces china despite it being the antithesis of American Values.

Methinks they have more in common than either would like to admit.

I would submit that many in Silicon Valley are the antithesis of American values as well, so it comes as no surprise.

Awesome, South Park once again speaks when nobody else in their industry does.

quote:

Originally posted by gearhounds:

quote:

Originally posted by braillediver:
Strange how silicon valley loves and embraces china despite it being the antithesis of American Values.

Methinks they have more in common than either would like to admit.

I would submit that many in Silicon Valley are the antithesis of American values as well, so it comes as no surprise.

“Give me just one generation of youth, and I'll transform the whole world.”

― Vladimir Lenin

It's great they pointed out organizations like the NBA are super woke until you fuck with their bottom line. OOPS!

It’s actually good to see Red China do this sort of thing and remind the world of what sort of totalitarian regime it is. No, it won’t faze the leftists who will either ignore their actions or even applaud them as keeping the fascists in line, but at least they won’t be able to claim that “true” socialism doesn’t need to suppress the truth to survive.

I'm surprised they were allowed to see it in the first place.

quote:

Originally posted by DaBigBR:
I'm surprised they were allowed to see it in the first place.

Well, this is probably one of the first times South Park has really gone after communist China.

SPOILER ALERT!

But, but, they went to all that trouble just to have Randy Marsh garotte Winnie the Pooh with piano wire! Doesn't that mean anything to those heartless commies?

In case anyone is interested in watching the episode in question, it looks like it will air again tomorrow (Wed 10/9) at 930pm on Comedy Central.

I just googled it and watched it on hulu

Here it is:


Link to original video: https://youtu.be/NJdbmQuRk80

Not hard to see why it pissed them off.

South Park's gross-out and potty-mouth humor obviously isn't for everybody. But it often contains some very clever satire. The episode "The Biggest Douche in the Universe" contains an accurate description of cold reading as well as a commentary about peoples' unwillingness to let deceased loved ones go, which makes them susceptible to such cons.

quote:

Originally posted by Balzé Halzé:
In case anyone is interested in watching the episode in question, it looks like it will air again tomorrow (Wed 10/9) at 930pm on Comedy Central.

You can watch pretty much all South Park episodes free on Comedy Central:

https://southpark.cc.com/full-episodes

quote:

Originally posted by PASig:
It's great they pointed out organizations like the NBA are super woke until you fuck with their bottom line. OOPS!

quote:

Originally posted by RAMIUS:

quote:

Originally posted by Balzé Halzé:
In case anyone is interested in watching the episode in question, it looks like it will air again tomorrow (Wed 10/9) at 930pm on Comedy Central.

You can watch pretty much all South Park episodes free on Comedy Central:

https://southpark.cc.com/full-episodes

Yes, I had forgotten that. I'm actually surprised that YouTube video is still available. They usually squash those pretty quick as they like to keep it all on their website.

I guess it's also available on Hulu.