It’s not just the NBA
It seems everyone is kowtowing to China.
Blizzard.
Apple.
Even Vans.
The only one standing up to China seems to be...
South Park?
Welcome back to China Uncensored.
I’m Chris Chappell.
The Chinese Communist Party spent the week being very offended.
Their public enemy number 1?
The NBA.
But don’t worry,
the Party has a much longer list of public enemies.
Starting with public enemy number 2, South Park.
On October 2nd,
South Park aired an episode called Band in China.
It was clearly creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone
venting all their frustrations about Hollywood and commercial
self-censorship to appease the Chinese Communist Party.
Who here thought that they had permission
to say anything critical of Chinese politics?
Well, it is true, sir.
The Chinese seem to exploit their own people with forced labor and…
Shut the [censored] up, Thor!
And obviously,
the show that mocked censorship in China,
got censored in China this week.
So the South Park wrote this:
“Like the NBA,
we welcome the Chinese censors into our homes
and into our hearts.
We too love money more than freedom and democracy.”
Savage.
Almost as savage as the NBA and South Park
doing more to raise Americans’ awareness
about China in a week than China Uncensored
has managed to do in 7 years.
I’m not bitter.
But now it’s time for China’s public enemy Number 3.
The video game company behind World of Warcraft
and the reason my college roommate failed out of school,
Activision Blizzard.
The company banned “a professional Hearthstone player in Hong Kong,
for a year,
while forcing him to forfeit a reported $10,000 in prize money.”
So that was at first a confusing statement to me
because I didn’t know what a Hearthstone is
or how much money you could make playing video games professionally.
I obviously wasted my life doing some stupid show
that educates people about China.
And Hearthstone is a free-to-play
online digital collectible card game.
Which judging from this image from
the Free China memes instagram page,
looks fun.
Think about it.
The Hearthstone player was banned for shouting
“Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times.”
And Blizzard bars any players for
“Engaging in any act that,
in Blizzard’s sole discretion,
brings you into public disrepute,
offends a portion or group of the public,
or otherwise damages Blizzard image.”
Clearly, the player needed to be banned
for supporting the people of Hong Kong,
because that offended a group of the public—
namely, China’s Communist authorities.
On the other hand, Blizzard may also have to ban itself
because their move offended all the members of the public
who support freedom in Hong Kong.
There’s talk of a global boycott against Blizzard.
And more unity from Democrats and Republicans.
Democratic Senator Ron Wyden said Blizzard showed
“it is willing to humiliate itself
to please the Chinese Communist Party.”
Republican Senator Marco Rubio said
“Recognize what’s happening here.
People who don’t live in #China must either self censor
or face dismissal & suspensions.
China using access to market as leverage
to crush free speech globally.”
Wow, reminds me of how YouTube
demonetizes our Hong Kong episodes
because they’re “not advertiser friendly.”
Okay, so Blizzard might be the most hated video game company
in the world right now.
Even more than EA.
But at least Activision Blizzard
successfully got out in front of this and avoided
becoming public enemy number one in China, right?
Well, unfortunately for Activision Blizzard,
karma is...a very nasty lady.
Someone suggested on Reddit that it would be a shame
if a character from the popular Blizzard game Overwatch
became the new symbol of the Hong Kong protests.
Yeah, that would be a real shame if that happened.
And now on to China’s public enemy number 4.
Apple.
Hong Kong protesters came up with
a crowd sourced app called HK Map Live
that shows in real time the location of Hong Kong police.
It also lets people know where
there’s case of live fire and tear gas.
The Chinese regime demanded that Apple
remove what they call “toxic software”—
Makes sense.
For the Chinese regime,
factual information is very toxic.
What did Apple do?
They removed the app.
As well as the app of online media Quartz,
which has been reporting a lot on the Hong Kong protests.
And..the latest update to the iPhone censored
the Taiwan flag emoji in Hong Kong and Macau.
Yeah, that’ll stop dissent!
Not like China’s public enemy number 5, though: Vans!
No, Vans the shoe company.
What, do you think the Chinese Communist Party
just goes around getting offended at everything?
Every year,
Vans holds what they call the Custom Culture competition.
People get to submit their own shoes designs
and the winner of an online vote gets $25,000
and their design manufactured by the brand.
Well, this year, this was one of the top designs,
with tens of thousands of votes.
A Hong Kong protest shoe.
I would buy that.
Except before the contest was over,
Vans announced,
in a Chinese and English statement on facebook,
That “a small number of artistic submissions have been removed.”
Bet you can’t guess which!
Honestly, it seems like Vans will let China...walk all over them.
And once again, in an attempt to appease the China market,
Vans ends up risking their entire market from angry fans
who want to boycott them.
But now on to China’ real public enemy—
the Trump Administration.
The Trump Administration has blacklisted 28 Chinese entities
over abuses in Xinjiang.
Those includes Hikvision and Dahua Technology,
two of the world’s biggest makers of video surveillance products.
Bet they saw saw that coming.
A day after the blacklist was announced,
the Trump administration put
visa restrictions on Chinese officials
involved in abuse of Muslim minorities in Xinjiang.
“The State Department said the visa restrictions
will apply to designated Chinese government
and Communist Party officials,
along with their families.”
Yes, the Trump Administration:
Defender of China’s Muslims.
We are in the strangest timeline.
Obviously, these new punishments by the Trump Administration
caused Chinese officials to realize the error of their ways.
The error being they should retaliate by restricting visas
for US citizens with anti-China links.
A source speaking to Reuters pointed out that Beijing
accuses the US and other governments
of inciting “anti-government protests
in both mainland China and Hong Kong.”
A 2 million person protest in Hong Kong?
Totally the CIA’s doing.
So with these new visa restrictions,
China is taking a hard stance against a problem...
they created themselves.
And that’s it for this week’s China news headlines!
And now it’s time for me to answer a question from one of you—
a fan who support China Uncensored
with a dollar or more per episode,
by contributing through the crowdfunding website Patreon.
James Wallberg asks,
“Do the protesters know about the South Park episode
denouncing companies following China's lead on the protests?”
Yes they do.
In fact, they’ve held neighborhood screenings
of the South Park episode.
By the way, we just got back to New York
from covering the protests in Hong Kong.
And running away from police shooting tear gas at us.
So we were not exactly up on the new season of South Park.
But we heard from you China Uncensored
fans that we needed to watch it.
So when we had some downtime, we did.
Matt, Shelley and I did have a good laugh.
Check out the episode if you haven’t already.
It says so many things we’ve been saying for years.
Only...they got way more attention for it.
Thanks for your question, James.
And if you have a question for me
you want to hear answered on the show,
sign up to join the China Uncensored 50 cent army,
by supporting the show with a dollar or more
per episode on Patreon.
YouTube is demonetizing us so much
we would have to shut down the show
if it weren’t for your support.
And to everyone, thanks for watching!
Once again I’m your host Chris Chappell.
See you next time.