Xu Mengge/Sina Weibo

BEIJING — He may be an award-winning satirist in the United States, but in China, even Stephen Colbert is not beyond parody: A provincial TV channel in the country has produced a show that borrows rather liberally from the popular American program.

The Banquet, broadcast on Ningxia Satellite TV, lifted the entire opening credits and other graphics from The Colbert Report. Everything from the host’s entrance—flying down the screen as English words buzz past—to the star-spangled background is mimicked, and even the show’s theme music, the guitar riff from “Baby Mumbles” by Cheap Trick, is reproduced note for note.

Online, Chinese were quick to criticize the rebranded show—once known by the staid name Guandian Zhisheng (Comment Matters)— which debuted this January.

“This is down-right plagiarism: Absolutely shameless. I hate this kind of thing,” remarked a young woman on Weibo, China’s Twitter. “Coolgirl1982” was concerned that the show could embarrass China. “With the great popularity of The Colbert Report, don’t you know how easily Colbert can make a laughingstock out of China, and ensure the whole world knows about it?” she asked.

The Banquet isn’t the first Chinese show to be accused of copycatting. In 2012, the American talk-show host Conan O'Brien discovered, with amusement, that the opening credits to his show Conan had been replicated by Dapeng Debade, a cheaply made program on the web portal Sohu. Conan’s good-natured response—and a sincere apology from host Dong Chengpeng, who calls himself Dapeng Dong—did away with any hard feelings. The next year, an advertisement for the luxury liquor brand Jian Nan Chun lifted the entire opening sequence, without acknowledgement, from the popular HBO show Game of Thrones. And to prove that such imitations are not exclusive to China’s mainland, TVB, a popular Hong Kong channel owned by the late tycoon Run Run Shaw, last year planted the CBS series Person of Interest’s opening into its detective show Tian Yan (Sky Watch).

The casual reaction of Americans to these infringements—Conan O’Brien even offered Dapeng a professionally designed replacement intro—may have emboldened TVZone, the state-owned production company responsible for The Banquet.