Xi Jinping Winnie the Pooh Comparisons

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About

Xi Jinping Winnie the Pooh Comparisons refer to memes comparing the Chinese President and the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China Xi Jinping to the Disney character Winnie the Pooh. Originally spread by Internet users in China to mock the president, the meme saw wider recognition among the Western users after Winnie the Pooh was blacklisted by the Chinese censorship authorities in July 2017, which produced the Streisand Effect.

Origin

On June 8th, 2013, the Chinese President Xi Jinping and the United States President Barack Obama met at The Annenberg Retreat at Sunnylands in Rancho Mirage, California, with a photograph of them walking together and smiling made by an unknown photographer (shown below, left).^[1] Before June 10th, 2013, Chinese social network Weibo user badtuzizi made a meme in which the two presidents were compared to an image of the Disney characters Winnie the Pooh and Tigger walking in a similar fashion (shown below, right). The Winnie the Pooh and Tigger artwork was drawn specifically for the meme.^[2]

Spread

On June 10th, 2013, Twitter user @MissXQ tweeted the photo, writing that the image was very popular on Weibo in the previous 24 hours (shown below, left).^[3] The tweet received over 900 retweets and 300 likes in six years. In the following hours, multiple Western media reported on the meme, including news posts by The Atlantic^[4] and BuzzFeed News.^[5] Additionally, another image comparing the presidents to Winnie the Pooh and Tigger was shared on June 10th, by @OffbeatChina Twitter account (shown below, right).^[6]

Winnie the Pooh Blacklisted in China

On July 14th, 2017, Twitter user @wuzuolai posted several screenshots from Chinese social media which indicated that memes comparing Xi Jinping to Winnie the Pooh were being scrubbed from the Chinese segment of the internet (tweet and images shown below).^[7] The tweet received over 130 retweets and 200 likes in two years. On the same day, Twitter user @shawnwzhang tweeted that Winnie the Pooh was added to the list of sensitive words in China due to the meme.^[8]

In the following days, multiple news outlets reported on the news, with Financial Times reporting that mentions of Winnie the Pooh were censored on Weibo and that a collection of animated Winnie the Pooh GIFs was removed from WeChat.^[9]

Christopher Robin Film Ban

On August 3rd, 2018, the Disney film Christopher Robin, a live-action adaptation of the Winnie the Pooh franchise, was banned in China. According to the Hollywood Reporter,^[10] "A source pins the blame on the country’s crusade against images of the Winnie the Pooh character, which has become a symbol of the resistance with foes of the ruling Communist Party, namely Chinese leader Xi Jinping."

NBA Apology, Blizzard Boycott, South Park Ban October 2019 Resurgence

In October 2019, following several controversies involving the influence of Chinese censorship on the United States media, including the Blizzard Boycott and China scrubbing all mentions and episodes of South Park television series, memes comparing Xi Jinping to Winnie the Pooh gained significant popularity among the Western users on Reddit, Twitter and other online platforms.