I have some questions about the “funny memes” about President Xi as Winnie the Pooh or Chairman Mao as a cat (I’m sure there are many more, for example I heard some people call President Xi an “accelerator in chief”, a very narrow minded and rude term in my opinion).
I basically only know the western narrative about those memes, I want to learn about how they are regarded in China, if they are actually illegal and/or “censored” and why, what their origins are, what they mean (I know from my scarce knowledge of Hanyu that Mao also means cat for example), and who made them.
I am trying to “de-propagandize” my mind, since I grew up only being taught the opposing side’s narrative. I don’t want to be disrespectful, and if I am please tell me, it is not my goal to be rude.
I think it is a good exercise to de-propagandize yourself to just select a single widely reported news story, and just spend a long time trying to find its sources and properly understanding it. Eventually you’ll find out that a lot of it is just 10th hand reporting, with kilogramme of intentional or foolish mistranslation, mixed with severe incuriosity and self-righteousness. You might also learn a lot about certain countries are portrayed in the global English-speaking newscorps and their transnational branches and how that differs from the local realities.
As a good practical example with the “Winnie the Pooh” ban rumour, I once tried to source this article and its many clones that popped up. After a lot of searching, it turns out it was actually just an edit made by a small Chinese video game website on Weibo and that the bear didn’t actually have an aura of white surrounding it in-game as many “Westerners” reported. If you google “Winnie the pooh kingdom hearts banned” you will see only those exact same pictures. Nevermind how blatantly racist this caricature is and how none of the news articles most propped up ever bother to give their sources, this fake story has escalated so far that lots of “westerners” will just straight up believe that Pooh was a white blob in a Japanese video game that doesn’t even seem to even have an exclusively Chinese version.