South Park has been making fun of everything and everyone for over 20 years now (good god it’s been around for that long?!) and yet its somehow managed to outdo itself by taking some huge shots at China and its slew of controversial censorship bans.
First it began with South Park‘s episode ‘Band in China,’ which lampoons China, its influence on Hollywood and businesses, and the ridiculous lengths at which it brings down the censorship hammer.
Unsurprisingly (and ironically), China banned the episode because it wasn’t too pleased with at how South Park made fun of it and decided to chuck an Eric Cartman-sized tanty.
The show’s creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, weren’t deterred and issued out an apology that was dripping with their trademark insincerity:
“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?”
The duo then doubled down on their anti-China stance in South Park‘s 300th episode by getting Randy to literally declare “f**k the Chinese government”:
![[SOUTHPARK SEASON 23/3] Randy says f**k the Chinese government [HQ] [CC]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ZnwOlBVEw-E/hqdefault.jpg)
It’s big, bold and a typical South Park thing to do. But even more than just making fun of China and its censorship hammer, Randy’s big “f**k the Chinese government” moment is basically voicing what we’re all thinking at the moment.
Over the past week or so, we’ve been shown first-hand just how companies and people are bending over backwards to avoid pissing off China despite knowing about its stance on democracy and censorship. Seriously, this past week we’ve seen:
- Chinese sponsors pulled money from the Houston Rockets and said it would stop streaming its NBA games after the team’s owner shared a tweet expressing solidarity with the Hong Kong protesters, which led to the NBA going out of its way to apologise and kiss China’s arse.
- Blizzard banned a pro Hearthstone player for expressing pro-Hong Kong sentiments, which in turn led to widespread condemnation from the gaming community and greater scrutiny into Blizzard’s Chinese ties.
- Chinese citizens being forced to have their faces scanned in order to get internet access and phone numbers.
And yet despite all those cooked incidents, South Park has been the only big mainstream Western thing (besides the internet) that’s come out and directly slammed China for being an arsehole to the world and democracy.
In the (probable) words of Eric Cartman, Trey and Matt are the only ones with balls at the moment.
It’s doubtful that Trey and Matt planned to have South Park go from vulgar animated show to being the moral compass for the Western world but that’s where we’re at right now.