It’s no big secret that the Chinese government likes a bit of web censorship, but you’d have thought that a bear of very little brain would slip under their radar unnoticed.
Well, he would have, if he hadn’t been co-opted for a series of memes highlighting his passing resemblance to Chinese president Xi Jinping. The memes, such as this one:
…have been around for some time. But for 24 hours yesterday, it was as if the bear had been banished to Christopher Robin’s imagination from whence he came. Images of Winnie the Pooh were deleted from Weibo (think China’s Twitter), and any comment featuring his name would fail to post with an error message.
It might seem strange to ban Winnie the Pooh for just 24 hours, but the temporary block coincidently seemed to tie in with the Chinese Communist Party’s conference. Fair enough, you probably don’t want your very serious government business to be associated with images like this:
Or this:
At the time of writing, the inhabitants of 100 Acre Wood seem to have returned to Weibo. Like the exuberant Tigger, you just can’t keep a good bear down. Even in China.
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