Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific airline apologizes for “Family Guy” flight episode featuring Tiananmen Square scene

Hong Kong airline Cathay Pacific has apologized for giving passengers an episode of the American TV show “Family Guy” to watch that included a scene and a joke that referred to the deadly 1989 attack on protesters in the Chinese capital’s Tiananmen Square.

The episode, from the first season of the American animated series, shows father Peter Griffin standing next to “Tank Man” in a reenactment of the infamous photo showing the lone resistance of the Chinese military as they moved in to break up the days-long pro-democracy protest. As the tanks approach, the cartoon father says: “Drop this, I just came to buy some fireworks,” before running away.

A spokesperson for Hong Kong’s flagship airline told the South China Morning Post on Tuesday that it had apologized to customers after someone complained on social media about the episode served on the flight.

“We emphasize that the content of this program does not represent the opinion of Cathay Pacific and we have immediately arranged for this program to be removed as soon as possible,” the airline said, according to this newspaper.

On June 4, 1989, Chinese soldiers under the command of Communist Party activists opened fire on thousands of protesters who had entered the center of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

The enduring image of the “Tank Man” has come to symbolize the bloody crackdown, which Chinese authorities have tried hard to erase from history ever since. CBS News Correspondent Elizabeth Palmer visited this square 30 years after the attackin 2019, and he did not find anything there to remember these events, and when he showed photos of the explosion, including the photo of “Tank Man”, to Chinese passers-by, none of them saw the photos.

After the unprecedented pro-democracy protests that took place in Hong Kong in 2019, the authorities in the autonomous region of China. he dispersed the oppositionwhich brought together hundreds of dissidents and civil society organizations and quickly adopted a new national security law that strengthened Beijing’s control.

In November, a The Hong Kong court sentenced 47 peopleincluding some prominent pro-democracy activists, regarding their involvement in illegal elections to elect the opposition.

Cathay Pacific said it regularly consults a third-party company responsible for its in-flight entertainment to ensure that the content offered meets airline standards, according to the South China Morning Post.