The Simpsons Go to China
Later this fall, “The Simpsons” will begin streaming in China, as part of a new multi-year deal between Fox and Sohu ..
.. America’s culture industry has never been so beholden to the rest of the world. Hollywood blockbusters like last summer’s “Transformers: Age of Extinction,” for example, have become meticulously engineered attempts to simultaneously court audiences from Peoria to Shenzhen.
.. Satire responds to the realization that we’ve been sold a bill of goods—that the choices we’re offered are illusory and all ultimately the same. It is a weapon of the weak, a way of critiquing the world by stepping outside of it, if only for the span of a joke. There’s a growing space for this kind of protest, as China’s fiercest Internet activists have become masters of censor-dodging puns and the authors of complex, ironic allegories for authoritarianism and surveillance.