Philippine social media yesterday was flooded with Winnie the Pooh memes in a winking expression of anti-China sentiment stirred by Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) state visit to Manila.
The “bear of very little brain” has been used on social media to poke fun at Xi, a joke that has drawn crackdowns from Beijing’s censors.
In one clip posted yesterday, Pooh bows before a mirror while “Hail Satan” flashes across the screen, while in another he floats near an artificial island built by Beijing in the South China Sea.
“Because Winnie the Pooh is banned in China because he’s the spitting image of Xi Jinping, let’s protest his presence by posting memes and photos of him with his [lookalike],” Facebook user Wilfredo Garrido wrote.
Many Filipinos resent Beijing’s claim over most of the South China Sea, which an international tribunal ruled in 2016 was without basis.
Comparisons between Xi and Pooh emerged in 2013, after Chinese social media users began circulating a pair of photographs that placed an image of Pooh and his slender tiger friend Tigger beside a photograph of Xi walking with then-US president Barack Obama.
In 2014, a photographed handshake between Xi and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was matched with an image of Pooh gripping the hoof of his gloomy donkey friend Eeyore.
In 2015, Global Risk Insights called a photograph of Xi standing up through the roof of a parade car paired with an image of a Winnie the Pooh toy car “China’s most censored photo” of the year.
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