Disney’s Hong Kong service drops ‘The Simpsons’ episode with ‘forced labour’ reference

Peony Hirwani
·2 min read
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Disney’s Hong Kong office has scrapped an episode from The Simpsons that contains a reference to “forced labour camps” in China.

The episode “One Angry Lisa”, which first aired in October, is not available on the company’s Disney Plus streaming service in Hong Kong, according to Reuters.

In the episode, the character Marge Simpson is shown images of China’s Great Wall during an exercise class when her instructor jokes: “Behold the wonders of China. Bitcoin mines, forced labour camps where children make smartphones.”

The joke is an apparent reference to China’s Xinjiang region, where the US and Amnesty International says an ongoing genocide against Muslim Uighurs is taking place.

Agnes Callamard, secretary general of Amnesty International, said their report revealed “detailed evidence of crimes against humanity, massive human rights violations, and a dystopian hellscape on a staggering scale”.

Amnesty International’s 160-page report, “Like we were enemies in a war”, said that the evidence it has collected concluded that the Chinese government has “committed at least the following crimes against humanity: imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law; torture; and persecution”.

Amnesty’s report is based on field and remote research carried out between October 2019 and May 2021. It includes first-hand testimonies gathered from former detainees of the internment camps and others who were present in Xinjiang after 2017, as well as from analysis of satellite imagery and data.

China has denied all allegations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

This isn’t the first time Disney’s Hong Kong offices have scrubbed an episode from a TV show.

In 2021, Disney removed a 2005 episode of The Simpsons that made a reference to the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.

The removal was a “clear signal to the local audience that it will remove controversial programmes in order to please” the Chinese government”, Grace Leung, a media policy professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, told the New York Times at the time.