Winnie the Pooh may seem harmless, but the Chinese government views him as such a threat that they have blocked social media users from mentioning him. And no, their concern is not about the silly cartoon bear’s failure to wear pants.
As documented in this article from The Guardian the Chinese government is gravely concerned that the bear’s image has been used in comical and gently mocking “memes” that suggest a resemblance between Pooh Bear and their President, Xi Jinping. The Guardian writes that “China’s ruling Communist party is highly sensitive to comical depictions of its leader, particularly as Xi attempts to consolidate power ahead of a key party congress later this year.”
The fact that the officials who regulate Internet access in China feel sufficiently threatened by such a mild type of ridicule of their leader that they will engage in censorship demonstrates the profound differences between the web culture in China and the more open web cultures in the United States and other Western nations. Even though one imagines the current U.S. leader would like to censor some of his legion of critics, he currently lacks the power to do so, and one hopes that it will stay that way. Criticizing politicians is as American as apple pie.
There is probably a downside to this more open society. After all, public cynicism about federal officials has become so pronounced that the central government is viewed with contempt by many Americans. Such attitudes helped the current president get elected by promising to metaphorically “drain the swamp” and clean up alleged corruption and mismanagement in Washington DC. I doubt members of the public in China would speak so disparagingly of Beijing officials, at least not out in the open.
Nevertheless, one of the virtues of an unfettered Internet is that it allows a wide variety of people to freely express a wide variety of viewpoints. Early internet pioneers sometimes claimed it was impossible for governments to censor or regulate the web, because of the decentralized design of the medium itself. As Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu’s excellent book “Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World” demonstrates, this claim turned out not to be true. A powerful government in a country with relatively little regard for private property and individual rights can impose substantial controls on the Internet, as has occurred in China.
Despite all the chaos and acrimony over politics in American Internet culture, hopefully it will never be as sterile and muffled as the political conversation on the Internet that is allowed to take place in China. I don’t want to live in a world where I can’t compare my president to Winnie the Pooh, after all.