Vancouver and Melbourne (Toronto Star) — The rogue cartoonist known only as Badiucao didn’t learn about the Tiananmen Massacre in school, from family or even on the internet. It was a pirated romance movie that set him on a path to celebrity and self-exile.

As a law student in Shanghai, Badiucao had never heard of the bloody crackdown. One evening in 2006, when he and his classmates were sitting around a computer to watch a flick from Taiwan, they found that a documentary had been recorded over part of it.