The China-Taiwan struggle has crept into the world of animated entertainment, sparking an online row and leading censors to stop video-sharing channels from showing a TV series produced by a South Korean-Chinese collaboration.

The internet clamor was raised after sharp-eyed mainland viewers noticed that Taiwan was missing from a map of China that flickered on the screen for only a second during an episode of the animated television series Super Wings.

Super Wings is co-produced by FunnyFlux Entertainment of South Korea and China’s Alpha Group. Targeting preschoolers, it premiered in South Korea in 2014 and was broadcast in mainland China starting in 2015 by Hunan Satellite TV. The protagonist of the series is a jet plane called Jett, who is tasked with delivering parcels to children around the world.

Super Wings was accused of political incorrectness after a netizen named Zachary Muadib noticed that Taiwan was missing from a map that flickered on the screen for only an instant. She posted a note on social media accusing Super Wings of not considering the self-governing island to be part of China.

Even though Muadib is an obscure netizen with only 325 followers on Weibo and one on Twitter, other Chinese netizens rallied around to condemn the producer. China’s “Little Pink” army — meaning a legion of chauvinistic, truculent Chinese net users — subsequently examined all four seasons of the show, available online, for other instances of political incorrectness.

They found that in other episodes, the size of Taiwan was disproportionately magnified in maps, while South Tibet and Aksai Chin — both subjects of decades-long territorial disputes between India and China — went missing.

In one episode about cultural identity, Jett is assigned to courier a package to a South Korean girl for the traditional Chuseok Festival. Some mainland netizens, however, saw this as an attempt by the producer to cause confusion among preschoolers by making them believe mistakenly that the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival originated in South Korea.

According to a report from state-run Xinhua Finance Media on March 5, the brouhaha resulted in the forced removal of the series by cyberspace authorities from various Chinese video-sharing platforms, including Bilibili and Youku, who cited mapping errors and procedural failures in vetting the contents.

Seoul and Beijing have been at loggerheads over several issues of cultural ownership including kimchi, a type of pickled vegetable, to the birthplace of the philosopher Confucius.

The first three seasons of Super Wings are still available on Netflix, which is censored in mainland China.

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