'This is how you rep America'! Trey Parker and Matt Stone's 'official apology to China' over South Park episode is pitch-perfect

In case you missed it, “Band in China,” last week’s episode of “South Park” was characteristically excellent. It was also highly, highly problematic — for the Chinese government, that is. China was so offended, in fact, that they’ve tried to purge it from Chinese media.

Here's how China reacted to that #SouthPark episode "Band in China": https://t.co/TEvuGAf02S

— Hollywood Reporter (@THR) October 7, 2019

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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.

And on Baidu’s Tieba, China’s largest online discussions platform, the threads and sub-threads related to South Park are nonfunctional. If users manually type in the URL for what was formerly the South Park thread, a message appears saying that, “According to the relevant law and regulation, this section is temporarily not open.”

The draconian response is par for the course for China’s authoritarian government, which has even been known to aggressively censor Winnie the Pooh, because some local Internet users had affectionately taken to comparing Chinese president Xi Jinping to the character.