Hong Kong’s Disney+ Nuked an Episode ofThe SimpsonsThat Mocked Mao Zedong

The irony immortal have smiled upon us once again : After Disney+ made its long - expect Hong Kong debut earlier this month , a 2005 installment of “ The Simpsons ” lampooningChinese government censorshipseems to have been discreetly scrub from the app in the region .

The episode in interrogation , Season 16 ’s , “ Goo Goo Gai Pan , ” raft with the Simpson sept ’s trip to Beijing and instantly satirise the Taiwanese authorities ’s tendency to inhibit information that casts it in an unfavourable light . In one prospect , Homer refers to Mao Zedong , as “ a little angel that killed 50 million people , ” and in another , the family tour Tiananmen Square , where a plaque read , “ On this site , in 1989 , nothing bump . ” ( In reality , several hundred student protesters were massacred at the site that twelvemonth after the authorities deployed tanks and used military force against civilians to quench the uprising ) .

business organisation about regime censorship have been growing in Hong Kong as of late , particularly after legislators passed anew plastic film censorship lawlast calendar month that successfully bans the release of governing - critical films in film festival mount if they are deemed to undermine national surety .

Photo: Angela Papuga / Staff (Getty Images)

It ’s not forthwith vindicated whether or not Disney+ made the determination to remove the ‘ Simpsons ’ episode on its own or capitulate to government pressures in doing so . But as theNew York Times write up , cyclosis services return outside the view of Hong Kong ’s new film censorship law — think the platform probably opted to take away the episode of its own free will .

The extent of the Chinese Communist Party ’s censorship in Hong Kong — and the expunction of the events in Tiananmen Square — is a travesty , peculiarly given the fact that manyexperts fearthat a generation of young people will grow up with no cognition of those events thanks to the blackout on educational materials .

While Disney is salivate as it eyes a magnanimous ploughshare of the Chinese mart , it should find shame in its complicity in aiding government propaganda mechanisms , but it is n’t the only streaming platformguilty of doing so . before this month , Netflix quietly remove two sequence of the spy dramatic event Pine Gap from its stream offerings in the Philippines after the commonwealth flag the use of a map that unintentionally legitimatise China ’s territorial claim in the South China Sea .

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