China censors Winnie the Pooh on social networks
BEIJING: Has Winnie the Pooh done something to anger China’s censors? Some mentions of the lovable but dimwitted bear with a weakness for “hunny” have been blocked on Chinese social networks.
BEIJING: China has banned some images of Winnie the Pooh, a teddy bear with a movie franchise and legions of young fans across the world, which had previously compared the fictional creature with President Xi Jinping.
There was no official statement announcing the ban but particular images and references to the portly bear and the “Chinese leader” have been wiped from China’s Twitter-like Weibo and We Chat, a mobile phone a pp used by millions here.
News website Quartz reported: “A July 15 post on a public account on We Chat, China’ s most popular messaging a pp, said that Winnie the Pooh content would be taken down due to its resemblance to a Chinese leader, citing China’s Ministry of Culture as the source of the information.”
That post has been taken down since then and an earlier link to the announcement in Chinese now leads to an error message.
“Posts including the Chinese name of the fictional bear were censored on Sin a We ibo, China’ s Twitter-like platform, over the weekend, while a collection of animated gifs featuring the bear were removed from social mes- saging app WeChat,” the Financial Times reported on Monday.
Over the weekend, comments mentioning the ban and questioning the move by the censors were targeted and removed. The latest around of censorship could be part of pre-emptive steps to remove any kind of criticism, even if light-hearted, against the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC) as it goes into a huddle before the 19 th Party Congress to be held in Beijing later this year.
This isn’t the first time that Winnie has been targeted in China. The UK-based Global Risks Insight, which researches and analyses political risks worldwide, said in a report in 2016 that the bear had faced censorship in China.