China Bans Winnie the Pooh

China

Winnie the Pooh is Banned in China

Because Winnie the Pooh looks like their president

The Winnie the Pooh character has become a lighthearted way for people across China to mock their president, Xi Jinping, but it seems the government doesn’t find the joke very funny.

It started when Xi visited the US in 2013, and an image of Xi and then president Barack Obama walking together spurred comparisons to Winnie – a portly Xi – walking with Tigger, a lanky Obama.

Earlier this year, the party announced that it wanted to eliminate presidential term limits for Jinping. This did not go over well with many Chinese citizens, who posted Winnie the Pooh memes on social media to compare the fictional bear to Jinping. It’s been a symbol of criticism towards Jinping since he took power in 2013, but blew up following the announcement. This prompted Chinese censors to crack down on the meme on Chinese social-media apps.

Why Winnie the Pooh? The joke is that Jinping supposedly resembles the Pooh bear in appearance. For instance, in the image below, the shorter, chubbier Pooh is walking alongside the taller, skinnier Tigger, which is compared to Jinping walking with former US president Obama.

In another circulated image, Pooh is hugging a pot of honey. The image reads, “Wisdom of little bear Winnie the Pooh” in Chinese and “Find the thing you love and stick with it” in English. The Chinese social network Weibo even blocked all mentions of John Oliver and his HBO show “Last Week Tonight” last month after Oliver criticised Jinping. Oliver also said Jinping was insecure about the Winnie the Pooh images being used to mock him.

“Clamping down on Winnie the Pooh comparisons doesn’t exactly project strength,” Oliver said. “It suggests a weird insecurity in him.” Winnie the Pooh has actually fallen foul of the authorities here before. This renewed push against online Pooh is because we are now in the run-up to the Communist Party Congress this autumn.

The meeting takes place every five years and, amongst other things, sees the appointment of the new Politburo Standing Committee: the now sevenmember group at the top of the Chinese political system.

As comparisons grew and the meme

Winnie the Pooh is being blocked on Chinese social media sites because bloggers have been comparing the plump bear to China’s President Xi Jinping

Websites that has been banned in China

As of September 2018, about 10,000 domain names are blocked in mainland China under the country’s Internet censorship policy, which prevents users from accessing proscribed websites from within the country.

Social

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, Snapchat, Picasa, WordPress.com, Blogspot, Blogger, Flickr, SoundCloud, Google+, Google Hangouts, Hootsuite.

Work tools

Google Drive, Google Docs, Gmail, Google Calendar (generally all Google services), Dropbox, ShutterStock, Slideshare, Slack, iStockPhotos, WayBackMachine, Scribd, Xing, Android, and many VPN sites.

Search engines

Google (both Google.com and the majority of local versions like Google. com.hk, Google.fr, etcetera), Duck Duck Go, various foreign versions of Baidu and Yahoo.

Media

The New York Times, Finacial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Bloomberg, Reuters, The Independent, LeMonde, L’Equipe, Netflix, Google News, many pages of Wikipedia, Wikileaks.

And the list goes on....

spread online, censors began erasing the images which mocked Xi. The website of US television station HBO was blocked last month after comedian John Oliver repeatedly made fun of the Chinese president’s apparent sensitivity over comparisons of his figure with that of Winnie. The segment also focused on China’s dismal human rights record.

Another comparison between Xi and Winnie during a military parade in 2015 became that year’s most censored image, according to Global Risk Insights. The firm said the Chinese government viewed the meme as “a serious effort to undermine the dignity of the presidential office and Xi himself”.

“Authoritarian regimes are often touchy, yet the backlash is confusing since the government is effectively squashing an potential positive, and organic, public image campaign for Xi,” the report said at the time. “Beijing’s reaction is doubly odd given the fact that Xi has made substantial efforts to create a cult of personality showing him as a benevolent ruler.”

Another reason for the film’s rejection by the authorities may be that China only allows 34 foreign films to be released in cinemas each year. That leaves Hollywood summer blockbusters, family films and contenders from across the world jockeying for a tiny number of spots.

Christopher Robin is the

Meet the Memes That got Winnie the Pooh Banned

The fear of honey-loving Winnie The Pooh is giving the Chinese government nightmares.

President Obama and Xi Jinping walking together

It started when Xi visited the US in 2013, and an image of Xi and then president Barack Obama walking together spurred comparisons to Winnie – a portly Xi – walking with Tigger, a lanky Obama.

President Xi Jinping popping out of his limousine

Another moment that was memorialized by social media users was from 2015, when Xi popped out of the top of a limousine. A meme was born when an image was found of Pooh in his very own car.

President Xi Jinping and Japan Minister Shinzo Abe

Xi was again compared to the fictional bear in 2014 during a meeting with Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, who took on the part of the pessimistic, gloomy donkey, Eeyore. second Disney film to be denied a release this year, after A Wrinkle in Time was blocked, while the studio’s Ant Man and the Wasp will open this month.

As silly as it is, the Winnie the Pooh ban is pretty scary, too. That Xi is apparently so sensitive about comparisons to a cartoon character is, admittedly, kind of funny. But it’s not just Pooh memes that are being censored — there’s a lot of reason to be concerned about the amount of power Xi has accumulated in China and the lack of freedom of expression that’s imposed there.

The BBC reports that the ban mainly applies to comments on Weibo, a Facebook-like social network used by 340 million people a month, which makes it more popular than Twitter, according to the BBC. The crackdown on Winnie the Pooh and ridicule of China’s leaders is strategically timed, the BBC says. There’s an important Communist Party conference scheduled, with several top government jobs up for grabs.

Chinese officials reportedly can block certain phrases to shut down discussions that run against the Communist Party.

Recently, authorities were able to virtually remove any existence of China’s top dissident Liu Xiaobo, the BBC reports. Liu won the Nobel Peace Prize, and died last week in custody. He was a professor, a writer and a human rights activist known for his participation in the infamous Tiananmen Square protests. CBS News’ Pamela Falk says he was an inspiration to a generation of young Chinese students and pro-democracy activists around the world.

When China’s national legislative body voted to abolish presidential term limits earlier this year — essentially opening the door for Xi to be president for life — censors became more vigilant about suppressing dissent and what they deemed “subversive content.”

“It’s a historic retrogression,” Li Datong, a former editor of China Youth Daily, told the Washington Post at the time.“This is going to cause some serious consternation within certain circles that are not marginal,” Patricia Thornton, a professor at the University of Oxford who studies Chinese politics, told the New York Times. “It’s been clear for some time that Xi doesn’t share power well at all, but it’s also clear to me that he genuinely fears resistance and opposition from within the party.”

China

Before Xi Jinping, the internet was becoming a more vibrant political space for Chinese citizens. But today the country has the largest and most sophisticated online censorship operation in the world.

In December 2015, thousands of tech entrepreneurs and analysts, along with a few international heads of state, gathered in Wuzhen, in southern China, for the country’s second World Internet Conference. At the opening ceremony the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, set out his vision for the future of China’s internet. “We should respect the right of individual countries to independently choose their own path of cyber-development,” said Xi, warning against foreign interference “in other countries’ internal affairs”.

No one was surprised by what they heard. Xi had already established that the Chinese internet would be a world unto itself, with its content closely monitored and managed by the Communist party. In recent years, the Chinese leadership has devoted more and more resources to controlling content online. Government policies have contributed to a dramatic fall in the number of postings on the Chinese blogging platform Sina Weibo (similar to Twitter), and have silenced many of China’s most important voices advocating reform and opening up the internet.

It wasn’t always like this. In the years before Xi became president in 2012, the internet had begun to afford the Chinese people an unprecedented level of transparency and power to communicate. Popular bloggers, some of whom advocated bold social and political reforms, commanded tens of millions of followers. Chinese citizens used virtual private networks (VPNs) to access blocked websites. Citizens banded together online to hold authorities accountable for their actions, through virtual petitions and organising physical protests. In 2010, a survey of 300 Chinese officials revealed that 70% were anxious about whether mistakes or details about their private life might be leaked online. Out of the almost 6,000 Chinese citizens also surveyed, 88% believed that it was good for officials to feel this anxiety.

For Xi Jinping, however, there is no distinction between the virtual world and the real world: both should reflect the same political values, ideals, and standards. To this end, the government has invested in technological upgrades to monitor and censor content. It has passed new laws on acceptable content, and aggressively punished those who defy the new restrictions. Under Xi, foreign content providers have found their access to China shrinking. They are being pushed out by both Xi’s ideological war and his desire that Chinese companies dominate the country’s rapidly growing online economy.

At home, Xi paints the west’s version of the internet, which prioritises freedom of information flow, as anathema to the values of the Chinese government. Abroad, he asserts China’s sovereign right to determine what constitutes harmful content. Rather than acknowledging that efforts to control the internet are a source of embarrassment – a sign of potential authoritarian fragility – Xi is trying to turn his vision of a “Chinanet” (to use blogger Michael Anti’s phrase) into a model for other countries.

The challenge for China’s leadership is to maintain what it perceives as the benefits of the internet – advancing commerce and innovation – without letting technology accelerate political change. To maintain his “Chinanet”, Xi seems willing to accept the costs in terms of economic development, creative expression, government credibility, and the development of civil society. But the internet continues to serve as a powerful tool for citizens seeking to advance social change and human rights. The game of cat-andmouse continues, and there are many more mice than cats.

The very first email in China was sent in September 1987 – 16 years after Ray Tomlinson sent the first email in the US. It broadcast a triumphal message: “Across the Great Wall we can reach every corner in the world.” For the first few years, the government reserved the internet for academics and officials. Then, in 1995, it was opened to the general public. In 1996, although only about 150,000 Chinese people were connected to the internet, the government deemed it the “Year of the Internet”, and internet clubs and cafes appeared all over China’s largest cities.

Yet as enthusiastically as the government proclaimed its support for the internet, it also took steps to control it. Rogier Creemers, a China expert at Oxford University, has noted that “As the internet became a publicly accessible information and communication platform, there was no debate about whether it should fall under government supervision – only about how such control would be implemented in practice.” By 1997, Beijing had enacted its first laws criminalising online postings that it believed were designed to hurt national security or the interests of the state.

China’s leaders were right to be worried. Their citizens quickly realised the political potential inherent in the internet. In 1998, a 30-year-old software engineer called Lin Hai forwarded 30,000 Chinese email addresses to a US-based pro-democracy magazine. Lin was arrested, tried and ultimately sent to prison in the country’s first known trial for a political violation committed completely online. The following year, the spiritual organisation Falun Gong used email and mobile phones to organise a silent demonstration of more than 10,000 followers around the Communist party’s central compound, Zhongnanhai, to protest their inability to practise freely. The gathering, which had been arranged without the knowledge of the government, precipitated an ongoing persecution of Falun Gong practitioners and a new determination to exercise control over the internet.

The man who emerged to lead the government’s technological efforts was Fang Binxing. In the late 1990s, Fang worked on developing the “Golden Shield” – transformative software that enabled the government to inspect any data being received or sent, and to block destination IP addresses and domain names. His work was rewarded by a swift political rise. By the 2000s, he had earned the moniker “Father of the Great Firewall” and, eventually, the enmity of hundreds of thousands of Chinese web users.