Drawing the News: Rebel Pepper, Xia Yeliang

Typhoon Fitow brought devastating floods to the city of Yuyao in the southeastern province of Zhejiang two weeks ago. Residents rioted on Oct. 11 after a newscaster on the street told the cameras that life was returning to normal. Protests continued into the following week, and riot police were called in.

Cartoonist Wang Liming, a.k.a. Rebel Pepper (Biantai Lajiao), drew this in response and wrote a message to the authorities (from Twitter):

Uncle Policeman, the frontline in Yuyao flood response isn’t here. You’ve gone the wrong way. Please go where the people really need you. Thanks.

警察蜀黍，余姚的抗洪第一线不在这里，你们走错路啦，请到人民更需要你们的地方去吧，谢谢了 [Source]

Wang was detained last Wednesday for police questioning, not because of his cartoon but because of information about flood victims he had shared on Weibo. He was released on Friday. (Rebel Pepper)

Rebel Pepper is back at work. He drew this cartoon in response to a CCTV segment on the high price of Starbucks in China: a tall latte costs RMB27 (US$4.43) in China, but only US$3.26 (RMB19.86) in Chicago. “Chinese consumers so far have responded with a yawn, and perhaps another latte,” Austin Ramzy commented on the New York Times Sinosphere blog. But some responded by comparing the cost of this luxury to sky-high prices for healthcare, fuel, and housing. “Coffee isn’t a must-have in life,” Offbeat China quotes one netizen. “But a home is.” (Rebel Pepper)

Economics professor and outspoken liberal Xia Yeliang was expelled from Peking University (PKU) last week. Xia is a signatory to Charter 08, the call for democracy in China penned by Liu Xiaobo. Liu won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work, but is now serving an 11-year prison sentence for “inciting subversion of state power.”

Xia’s dismissal calls into question partnerships between US institutions and PKU–professors from Wellesley College wrote an open letter to the university in September, to no avail. The New York Times published an editorial today exhorting partner institutions to push PKU to bring Xia back.

In Ah Ping’s take on the dismissal, luminaries from the university’s past hover over campus rubble (left to right): Cai Yuanpei, president from 1916 to 1922; philosopher and essayist Hu Shih; and historian Ch’ien Mu. The fourth panel laments, “Before it collapsed, this was a place of true learning.” (Ah Ping)

Regulators have singled out the children’s show Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf in a new effort to tone down violence on TV. The cartoon came under fire earlier this year after two boys suffered severe burns while reenacting a scene from the show.

Just as Itchy and Scratchy (the hyper-violent cartoon Bart and Lisa Simpson love) were once tamed, Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf will probably have to tone down their act. But cartoonist Xiao Mao has an idea: make the goat a WWII Japanese soldier the wolf a Chinese peasant, and “it doesn’t look violent at all!” Chinese TV is always awash in programs set during the “War of Japanese Aggression.” (Xiao Mao)