Baozou Manhua in trouble over jokes about civil war heroes — just a week after its spinoff film closed a huge Netflix deal.
China’s leading “rage comics” brand, Baozou Manhua, has been silenced on multiple online platforms after one of its videos was accused of slandering revolutionary heroes and martyrs.
On Thursday, the Beijing government urged websites to clear out content that defames heroes and martyrs or distorts and diminishes their deeds. The Heroes and Martyrs Protection Law, which came into effect on May 1, makes such conduct punishable.
The accusation relates to a 58-second Baozou Manhua video clip that was posted to content aggregator Jinri Toutiao earlier this month. First released in 2014, it joked about two Chinese civil war figures: Ye Ting, an army general, and Dong Cunrui, a People’s Liberation Army soldier who destroyed an enemy bunker in a suicide bombing.
In the clip, host Wang Nima dons a rage face mask and narrates: “Dong Cunrui stared at the enemy’s bunker, his eyes bursting with rays of hate. He said resolutely, ‘Commander, let me blow up the bunker. I am an eight-point youth, and this is my eight-point bunker.’” The script was a pun on a KFC sandwich available for a limited time in 2014. Continue to read the full article here.
This is original content by Sixth Tone and has been republished with permission.
