Tuesday, October 8, 2019

"'South Park' Scrubbed From Chinese Internet After Critical Episode" (Michael Bloomberg had no comment)

"Oh my God, you killed Kenny. You bastards."

From the Hollywood Reporter, October 7:

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....MORE
From the South China Morning Post September 30:

Xi Jinping ‘no dictator’, American businessman Michael Bloomberg says
...“When the public says ‘I can’t breathe the air’, Xi Jinping is not a dictator. He has to satisfy his constituents, or he’s not going to survive … The trouble is you can’t overnight move cement plants and power plants just outside the city that are polluting the air and you have to have their product. So some of it takes time.”

Hoover countered, saying China was not a democracy and Xi was not answerable to voters.
“He doesn’t have a vote, he doesn’t have a democracy. He [isn’t held] accountable by voters. Is the check on him just a revolution?” she said.

“You’re not going to have a revolution. No government survives without the will of the majority of its people,” Bloomberg said. “He has to deliver services.”

Hoover then said: “I’m looking at people in Hong Kong who are protesting and wondering whether the Chinese government cares what they have to say.”

Bloomberg said that in government – “even governments that aren’t what we could call a democracy” – there were many stakeholders with vested interests and “they have an impact”....
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