A blood-soaked cartoon that marks the Year of the Rabbit by portraying a bunny revolt against brutal tiger overlords has proven an online hit, with its thinly veiled stab at China’s rulers.
The South Park-style video, in which the persecuted rabbits overthrow the tigers, went viral on video-sharing sites in recent days thanks to its gruesome depiction of a number of recent scandals.
It was unavailable on web sites yesterday, apparently deleted by skittish government censors.
The cartoon begins with baby rabbits who die horribly from drinking “Sanlu” milk. Sanlu is the now-defunct Chinese dairy giant that was at the center of a huge scandal in 2008 over tainted milk. The milk was blamed for killing six infants and sickening 300,000 others.
In the online video, rabbit parents are then savagely beaten by tiger thugs when they complain, or are run over by cars and killed.
The latter scenario is an obvious reference to two recent notorious cases.
In one, the son of a police official in northern China accused of striking and killing a pedestrian in October while driving drunk was tried this week. He reportedly tried to escape arrest at the scene by invoking his father’s name.
In another, a village chief was crushed by a truck last month. Villagers allege he was killed by local officials to silence his complaints about his land being seized by authorities.
The bunnies in the video are a reference to the Lunar Year of the Rabbit, which begins on Thursday, while this year is the Year of the Tiger.
After an orgy of violence as the bunnies rise up en masse, the video ends with a character saying: “It will really be an interesting year.”
China operates a huge system of online censorship that deletes content considered a threat to the primacy of the Communist Party.
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