CHINA
Hong Kong newspaper fires cartoonist over his strip's "deadly"
implication (1995)
After joking that cartoonists could be executed in a soon-to-be communist-controlled
Hong Kong, Larry Feign's long-running popular feature was killed
by The South China Morning Post. The paper had been publishing "The
World of Lily Wong" for eight years before it smothered the strip the
day after the episode appeared in May 1995. Readers were left without an
explanation, but to reporters, executive editor David Armstrong offered
a reason of "just economics." He pointedly noted that it costs
70(!) times less per month to buy Trudeau's "Doonesbury"
than what the paper had paid to Feign. However, unless the paper prided
itself in greed, economics could hardly have been the reason for firing
anybody from one of the most profitable newspapers in the world. The
South China Morning Post netted nearly 50 per cent of its total revenue
in the last six months of 1994.
Feign's strip that cost him his job
Chinese comic book sparks riots (1992)
Communist authorities steamrolled the worst uprising in years in Xining,
Qinghai province, in mainland China, triggered by the publication of a comic
book that was perceived as an insult to Islam. "Swiftly Turning Mind,"
originally published in Taiwan, carried a cartoon picturing Muslims praying
next to a pig. In Islam eating pork is considered sacrilegious. That one
frame in the comic book caused the outrage of tens of thousands of Muslims
who in a massive street protest burned police cars and attacked government
buildings.
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