Respect their authoritah! After country-wide controversy, South Park‘s creators have fired back at China in their new episode – declaring ‘Fuck the Chinese government’.
Since its early inception in 1997, the cartoon has been pushing the boundaries of comedy and taste. From its World of Warcraft spoof, to the ‘HUMANCENTiPAD’ – South Park is a wickedly gross, ingenious, fucking hilarious show.
Their latest scandal saw a new episode, ‘Band In China’, banned in China – with all existence of the show, from clips to discussion of the show, wiped from the country’s media.
Have a look at the clip from the episode here:
The whole episode was jabbing at the Chinese government’s love affair with censorship, as well as Hollywood’s reliance on the country to keep box office numbers healthy.
During the episode, Randy runs into an imprisoned Winnie the Pooh – who has hilariously become a symbol of resistance against China’s ruling Communist Party and its leader, Xi Jinping.
Now, the shows creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker have upped the ante.
In their 300th milestone episode on Wednesday (October 9), titled ‘SHOTS!!!’, Randy is forced to declare ‘Fuck the Chinese government’ – he’s initially reluctant due to the fact he’s been selling marijuana in the country.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, ‘Band in China’ was projected onto screens throughout Hong Kong’s Sham Shui Po district on Tuesday to a ‘large and appreciative audience’ – nice to see people can take a joke.
However now, as per The Hollywood Reporter, Chinese social media site Weibo responds to a search of South Park with zero results, and all links to clips and seasons of the show are now dead on the streaming service Youku.
If users manually type in the URL for what was formerly the South Park thread on Baidu’s Tieba, China’s largest online discussions platform, a message allegedly appears saying: ‘According to the relevant law and regulation, this section is temporarily not open.’
As well as offering up the full episode for free – to let fans see what all the fuss is about – Parker and Stone issued a totally sincere apology for all the riffraff.
Referencing Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets who recently shared his support for Hong Kong’s independence, the creators clearly had fun writing the ‘apology’.
It read:
Like the NBA, we welcome the Chinese censors into our homes and into our hearts. We too love money more than freedom and democracy.
Xi doesn’t look just like Winnie the Pooh at all. Tune into our 300th episode this Wednesday at 10! Long live the Great Communist Party of China! May this autumn’s sorghum harvest be bountiful! We good now China?
Surely, the creators can’t be far away from telling China, in true Cartman style, to ‘suck my balls’.
If you have a story you want to tell send it to UNILAD via story@unilad.com
After graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University with an NCTJ and BCTJ-accredited Multimedia Journalism degree, Cameron ventured into the world of print journalism at The National, while also working as a freelance film journalist on the side, becoming an accredited Rotten Tomatoes critic in the process. He’s now left his Scottish homelands and took up residence at UNILAD as a journalist.