Xi Jinpooh
Xi Jinping resembles Winnie the Pooh. The internet noticed. A meme was born.
It’s not that the Pooh meme says something profound about Xi. Rather its Xi’s response to the meme that says something profound about him.
In 2013, a meme comparing an image of Obama walking with Xi and an image of Tigger walking with Pooh circulated on Chinese social media. While there was no response from Obama, Xi began his crusade to wipe the image from the internet. In a NYT piece from Nicholas Kristof,
Xi’s anxiety about the internet, religion, Hong Kong protesters, even Winnie-the-Pooh underscores his own insecurities. Xi seems terrified that real information will infiltrate the Chinese echo chamber, undermining his propaganda department’s personality cult around a benign “Uncle Xi.”
The Xi Pooh comparison continued to circulate in 2014 after a strained handshake with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and again in 2015 after a military parade. In 2019, the meme became a symbol of freedom amongst Hong Kong protesters. The simple joke represents the freedom to criticize one’s own government.
If code scripts machines, media scripts human beings.
The Great Firewall of China controls media by scrubbing mentions of Uyghur concentration camps, Tibetan repression, and Winnie the Pooh. As COVID-19 started to spread, they suppressed information that could have saved millions. Following the death of Dr. Li Wenliang, one of the Wuhan whistleblowers reprimanded by the CCP, the hashtag “I want freedom of speech” trended on Weibo with over 2 million posts. Those posts were gone the following morning.
Decentralized blockchain technology provides the power of uncensorable communication. No matter how hard he tries, Xi cannot remove this symbol from the public ledger, nor from the public discourse.
Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again?
— A.A. Milne — Winnie the Pooh
