When the campy Korean music video called “Gangnam Style” became a surprise hit—the most watched clip in the history of the Internet—Chinese artists complained that they could never have created it because the culture officials that preside over their work would never have permitted a silly spoof of Beijing’s high-living elite and would, instead, have insisted that a music video for export be grand and impressive. The artists circulated a bitter comic strip called Shanghai Style, in which the creator of a Gangnam-style dance move is not showered in fortune but is, instead, incarcerated for
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