China Censors Winnie-the-Pooh on Social Media
The government’s army of censors has been battling the meme since at least 2013, when Mr. Xi met President Barack Obama at the Sunnylands estate in Rancho Mirage, Calif. At the time, internet users posted pictures of Mr. Xi
and Mr. Obama alongside an image showing Winnie-the-Pooh and his smiling companion, Tigger.
After a fresh round of news reports about the censorship on Monday, including on the front page
of the Financial Times, Chinese internet users took to social media sites to test the ban.
Trending on Weibo: Abe as Eeyore and Xi as a smug Pooh #APEC pic.twitter.com/lx53FzkVzu Research by King-wa Fu at the University of Hong Kong showed
that an image of Winnie-the-Pooh was one of the most consistently censored items on Chinese social media sites in 2015.
Images of Winnie-the-Pooh and Tigger alongside Mr. Xi and Mr. Obama after their meeting in 2013 were quickly deleted.
Internet users in China have in recent days reported problems posting references
to the warmhearted bear of A.A. Milne’s children’s books on social media sites.
Winnie the Pooh gets banned from Chinese social media for looking too much like Xi Jinping https://t.co/5L4DTTPexa
pic.twitter.com/KKbcAaZYzJ The recent blackout does not appear to be uniform.