From the bird flu to the box office, a roundup of online cartoonists’ take on recent events in China.
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- Quentin Tarantino was supposed to have his Chinese box office debut this week with Django Unchained, the award-winning film about a former slave cutting a bloody swath across the American south and west to save his wife. But one minute into a Thursday morning screening, the projector stopped rolling and the lights went on, says Weibo user @血一刀. Tarantino had already edited the film to be slightly less bloody, but that apparently wasn’t enough to stave off the eleventh-hour edict. Some netizens suspect a scene with full frontal male nudity is to blame. (Badiucao/@badiucao)
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- Instead of Lady Liberty holding a torch in one hand and a law tablet in the other, this statue cradles an imperial gold sycee and thrusts a government seal above her head. At the feet of the Statue of Liberty lays a broken chain; this bald goddess stands atop a prison cell. The symbol of freedom and democracy now represents the greed, rubber-stamping, and suppression on which the Chinese party-state runs. Any reference to the Statue of Liberty naturally alludes to the Goddess of Democracy, the paper mache statue constructed during the Tiananmen protests of 1989 and crushed by tanks on June 4th of that year. (Li Yongqiu/@李永秋漫画)
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- A man powers his bulldozer ahead, flying the flag of “accident.” In the span of eight days in March and April, three people were crushed to death by construction vehicles in Hubei, Henan, and Sichuan provinces. All three were villagers asking for compensation for the the forced demolition of their homes to make way for new building projects. In response to popular outrage, a Xinhua editorial called for the people responsible to be held accountable according to the law, “regardless of whether they were ‘intentional,’ ‘faults [in the equipment],’ or ‘accidents’” ( 无论是“故意”“过失”还是“事故”). (Dashixiong/@大尸凶的漫画)
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- Public health scares are nothing new in China, but this spring is proving particularly bad. Smog is contributing to rising cancer rates. In March, at least 12,000 dead pigs were pulled from the Huangpu River, which flows to Shanghai. A new strain of bird flu has infected at least 43 people and killed 11. Food safety scandals have been the norm for years. Is apocalypse now? (Rebel Pepper/变态辣椒)
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- Could the bird flu be a conspiracy? On Monday, PLA colonel Dai Xu wrote on Weibo that the H7N9 avian flu is a biological weapon deployed by the U.S.–just like SARS was in 2003. Global Voices translates, “At that time [the U.S.] wanted to attack Iraq and was worried that China would take action, so they adopted bio-psychological weapons and China fell into chaos as [they] had anticipated.” Yet Dai dismisses the public’s flu fears: “The death toll will not exceed one thousandth of the deaths from car accidents in China.” Even Hu Xijin, chief editor of the state-run Global Times, called him out. ( Di Qingzi/@狄青子)
