MCLC: Cartoons spoofing corrupt politicians in Changsha

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Cartoons spoofing corrupt politicians in Changsha
Source: NYT (1/15/15):
Cartoons Spoofing Corrupt Politicians in China Anger City
By JESS MACY YU
President Xi Jinping of China has vowed that there will be no relenting in his sweeping crackdown on official corruption, but an artist in the central city of Changsha who mounted his own campaign is facing a government slap down.
In the past week or so, dozens of large, colorful cartoons spoofing corrupt politicians and their shady dealings appeared on walls alongside a city road, attracting the attention not just of passing motorists and social media, but of the local authorities, who have ordered that they be painted over.
长沙街头出现（反对腐败）漫画，这是社会的“负能量”吗？Changsha Street (against corruption) comic, it is a society of “negative energy”?
On Monday, Xingsha Times, a newspaper based in Changsha, reported that 33 cartoons, some featuring life-size characters, covered the walls alongside Dong Liu Road between two intersections. On Thursday, another local paper, Xiaoxiang Morning News, said the identity of the artist, or artists, was unknown. It was unclear when the images were painted.
The Xingsha Times quoted a city official who, while acknowledging that the cartoons aimed to combat corruption, denounced them as going too far.
“At first sight, one assumes it is part of a cultural wall to promote an honest and clean government,” said the unnamed official from the Changsha city management bureau. “But the form of the expression is excessively direct, and the satire goes beyond the limit.”
He added that the content of anything posted on public walls should be “affirmative and positive,” not of a nature that risked “stirring up the people’s disgust with the government.” Any future postings, he said, would first have to be approved by his bureau, which had already arranged to have the walls repainted.
The cartoons depict a wide variety of situations, all related to the greed of government officials. While some use Communist Party markings to identify the characters, others employ less subtle labels such as “pickpocket” and “cloth-eating moths.”
One, with a clear reference to recent corruption scandals, featured an official at a U-shaped table spread with counterfeit or altered receipts, reimbursement slips, and contracts for questionable deals. It carried the caption: “Corruption and degeneration harm the country and harm the home.”
By Thursday, the cartoons had attracted a flood of comments online.
“The cartoons don’t elicit the disgust of the passers-by, but of the leaders,” a user named Common People Have Dreams said on the microblog site of Phoenix News, a media group based in Hong Kong.
Wrote another user, called 8341: “The officials are scared that people will talk about the rotten affairs they’re mixed up in.”
State-run sites such as People Daily and Xinhua also circulated the images online, prompting more comments.
“So anticorruption can’t even be discussed or written about lightly,” lamented a user named Bian Chi Meng Peng Hai on the People’s Daily Weibo page.
“Is this necessary?” asked a user named A Poor Monk Just Loves a Girl. “They don’t dare to directly face the situation. They blame the criticism for being too harsh, and now they want to conceal the cartoons to deceive themselves and others.”
Some commenters offered their own brand of satire.
The cartoons “obviously violated regulations on safeguarding secrets,” wrote a user on Sina Weibo named Wu Lijin. “So of course the wall must be repainted.”
by denton.2 at osu.edu on January 15, 2015
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