I always thought it was because xi Jinping is a fat fucking moron who actually looks like whinny the Pooh’s genocidal twin. It never occurred to me that it might be a race thing.
Same. The color never came into the equation in my head but now I can see how it could be considered racist, yeah.
Idk I dont think it’s racist because it wasn’t used because Pooh is yellow he just happens to be yellow. Use piglet or Eeyore for all I care.
Dude looks like Pooh tho in the face all color aside ur spot on.
Huh, never even thought about him being yellow, I always thought the joke was he was fat and stubby (and I guess oh-so-cuddly)?
Plus it’s not a good meme so much as he Streisand Effect’d the shit out of it. Like, the shiiiiit out of it…
It’s not deliberate
Your point is mentioned by the meme.
(But I disagree with the meme. Saying you are not allowed to satirically compare asians with characters that happen to be yellow is a problematic statement in itself.)
Except that centuries ago the Europeans decided to start the Yellow Peril campaign to strip Asians of their humanity by calling them the ‘yellow danger’, which still has its effects today. Other than being a yellow bear there is nothing noteworthy comparing Xi to Winnie. Do better. Would it be okay for you to satirically compare black people with characters that ‘happen to be black’?
The comparison stems from the general physique and perceived mannerisms that supposedly match between the two. I’m not sure the colour was an original part of the meme anyway. The origin was that image of Xi and Obama walking alongside each other, with the drawing of Pooh and Tigger to show how similar of an image it was. Xi was not coloured yellow in those earlier images, that started after the CCP cracked down on those memes.
The origins of the meme may very well be harmless. It started on Chinese social media AFAIK. Westerners going on a run with the meme is what made it problematic.
The only problem here is you
Saying “This isn’t racist because it is based off of a similar meme that originated in China” has big “I can’t be racist when I say the N-word because I have a black friend.” energy.
It’s less that and more “ohh, it’s fine when they say it, but when I say it, it’s racist” which isn’t reasonable in the first place for the n-word, but doubly so in this case since we know there’s a lot of racism going around in the HK independence “movement.”
Daily reminder HKs minimum wage is 1 dollar for servants and 5 dollars per hour for workers, they have the highest rent in the entire world yet some of the worst living conditions and historically have only had 49% of there parliment able to be elected, the other 51% is 8 western buisnessmen.
HK separtists advocate for the above because they are the lucky enough ones to be above the slave class and they want this relationship to continue, and for things to remain the same rather than for things to get better via intergation with china, which would give the HK working and underclass access to cheap housing via mainland China, who have 90% house ownership rate vs HKs like 17%.
Source;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_domestic_helpers_in_Hong_Kong
Does that mean the entire Parliament in HK is just 15 people?
Nah, they basically split there highest democratic chamber into two, with one half being elected and the other half appointed unelected people to represent UK buisness interests, they have a majority over the elected half.
Also to clarify the small minority of the other half have more voting power than all of the other elected members, to effectively give them a majority.
HK has essentially been a autocratic imprealist state serving the bougie of HK and UK interests since it changed hands to the UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_development_in_Hong_Kong#Under_British_rule
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Council_of_Hong_Kong
As you can see here, they ‘permitted’ HK residents to elect half of the people in the chamber, with them (the UK) retaining control of the other half (while still retaining the deciding vote) and that China actually offers them full democracy, unconditionally.
The founding members of what is reffered too in HK as ‘ExCo’ (with the other chamber usually its ‘LegCo’)
I challenged this notion with a lib the other day.
The watermelon originated in Africa. That doesn’t mean that the vile caricaturised depictions of black people eating watermelons is somehow not inherently racist.
You can also look to the origin and continuing usage of the swastika, especially in Asian cultures, as another example here - you aren’t going to tell me that the right-angled unicode swastika being used by westerners on the internet isn’t done in service of fascism 99% of the time.
And on that matter, don’t let erm-ackshually dorks tell you that the 90 degree swastika wasn’t used by Nazis and isn’t representative of them. One of the most famous depictions of the Nazi swastika is a right angled one:
https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1214749781387436032/pu/vid/450x360/o0Nxlts0lffM8lUv.mp4
“The watermelon originated in Africa. That doesn’t mean that the vile caricaturised depictions of black people eating watermelons is somehow not inherently racist.”
That’s not what is happening here tho. You can’t claim that every cartoon where a black person interacted with a watermelon is racist.
Just like here you can’t claim it just cuz the character is yellow it is racist.
Pooh is used cuz dude looks like Pooh… Not cuz he’s yellow. The fact that Pooh is yellow too doesn’t suddenly make it racist.
deleted by creator
The libs downvoting this post en masse 🤣🤣🤣🤣
…didn’t this meme start in China? Pretty crucial context here lol.
It’s strange that this concern for context only ever goes in one direction. Symbolism, like words, develop meaning through their usage.
If I were to say that I ejaculated during intercourse with your wife last night, would you take that to be an insult or would you be dying on that same context hill that the verb to ejaculate used to refer to suddenly making a statement and that intercourse used to refer to having a discussion with someone?
Probably not.
Would you say that the swastika isn’t a Nazi symbol because it originated in Indo-European religious and cultural symbology?
Maybe. I can’t speak for you.
The origin of something doesn’t determine its usage.
It did, as a light-hearted joke comparing Xi and Obama walking side by side with a resembling image of Tiger and Pooh. Of course, westerners then proceeded to take it and turn it into their own distortion and elaborate some story about how China is banning Winnie the Pooh and that is why painting a chinese man yellow with photoshop is a sign of resistance against a government on the other side of the globe and totally not racist.
It resembles a lot the same thing that happened with that image that floated the internet around a few years ago of Putin photoshoped as a stereotypically and comically flamboyant homosexual man, which is totally not homophobic even if the punchline is “he’s gay” because you can always make it up that the image is banned somewhere and thus is a sign of resistance and contains no reactionary sentiment behind.
I wouldn’t really called the original “light hearted” since Obama was compared to character named literally “Tigger”.
Tigger
I remember that meme showing up on r/blursedimages, and Le Aberage Redditors were absolutely making the connection.
I didn’t catch that (in my language he’s just called the name of the animal, translated). I am unsure if that was intentional or not, however.
Yea that one is pretty easy to connect the dots, I think it’s safe to say people from China, the most populous country on Earth, can be racist, just as any individual from any other country can be.
for background info, the chinese government does not ban the actual associate of winnie pooh to xin unless it is used to promote racism contrary to the claim by the red fascist tankiejerkers, liberal sloganists, and the NATO-backed hong kong rioters by young students who never know about the period before the return of hong kong to chinese rule. The liberal sloganists justify the racist act on the claim that it is directed towards an oppressive dictator, but they cannot explain why they attack a ‘tyrant’ for their chinese ethnicity and appearance instead of their morality. For more suspicions, the winnie pooh association of Xi Ping in chinese hate crime propaganda are from people who contradict their hong kong independence slogan with return to british colonial rule and who believe that british immigrants are the only true ‘hong kongers’.
These colonial worshipping kids have been kneeling so long that they’ve forgotten how to stand.
Their beloved ‘prime minister’ Churchill has quotes that wouldn’t feel out of place in Hitler’s collection:
“I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion”
[the Pashuns] needs to “recognise the superiority of race”
“I hate people with slit eyes and pigtails. I don’t like the look of them or the smell of them — but I suppose it does no great harm to have a look at them.”
We shall have to take the Chinese in hand and regulate them… as civilised nations become more powerful they will get more ruthless, and the time will come when the world will impatiently bear the existence of great barbaric nations who may at any time arm themselves and menace civilized nations. I believe in the ultimate partition of China—I mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph.
The last one still rings true with the “just the government not the people” libs nowadays.
The last one is utterly jaw-dropping, not necessarily because I’m surprised Churchill said it, but how this sentiment has hardly suffered a dent in the contemporary “western” zeitgeist.
Replace a few words, trade “Aryan” for “European”, “civilized” for “developed”, and “barbaric” for “authoritarian”… boom, you’ve got a chart-topping WaPo OpEd.
good to find a like minded person, i was just thinking something like that, that democracy x authoritarian is just rebranded colonial thinking, you paint a target in a country to justify intervening in it
After some scrathing you can also quite often hear the three previous too, maybe except the pigtails part.
The “Xi got butthurt and banned all of Winnie the Pooh in China” thing is mind numbingly easy to disprove. Just search the phrase on literally any Chinese internet service. If they still spout that claim, they’ve obviously not done even one minute of research or fact checking and are so clearly just blindly regurgitating propaganda (which they also accuse people who support China of doing, funny how that works) that all of their opinions on China can be safely ignored.
You know what I did when I first heard that claim? I went straight to Baidu and searched up Winnie the Pooh, in English even, and surprise surprise it returned results like any other search engine. And this was when I was still a liberal who didn’t like China.
Endless projection
-burguer liberals using a dumb, fat foodie as an insult
-they don’t see the irony
pottery
deleted by creator
“Yeah guys I’m totally not racist, I just think those dirty yellow ching-chongs are ugly and inferior to our superior white race and we should nuke all those subhumans to make way for more lebensraum for the white race !1!!1111!!1!111”
Anti-Asian Racism
A liberal once made an anti-CPC song with the lyrics “They say ching chang chong and oppress Hong Kong”
That sounds like something I would have found funny back when I was an idiot eleven-year-old.
Reminds me of a popular kindergarten birthday song in The Netherlands where you squint your eyes with your fingers and sing ‘Hankipanki Shanghai, Hankipanki Shanghai, Hankipanki Hankipanki, Hankipanki Shanghai’ to the tune of Happy Birthday To You.
It’s not done anymore in most schools these days AFAIK but only since recently
least racist dutch
Hey we can’t expect that much of a country where they blackface once every year despite decades of black people asking them to stop
Can I offer you some Belgian chocolate [CW: disfigurement, discussions of racism] in these trying times?
Controversial product indeed. Doesn’t help that the man who invented it, Mr. Hakker, would be called Chopper if translated to English as well.
So then it’s also racist to compare Obama to Tig…
Never mind.
On a note outside of the racism discussion, I don’t think Winnie the Pooh is yellow. He’s not orange like Tigger but he’s definitely not yellow like Rabbit.
Mostly depends on the shading the artist uses. He’s often depicted just as yellow as rabbit, or just as orange as Tigger.
It’s almost as if color isn’t the point here and op is splitting hairs for no reason.
Nah, people in the West who use the Winnie the Pooh meme are 100% being racist
deleted by creator
Chinese here. Thanks everybody for fighting racism on my behalf. I’d just like to point out that I’ve never considered, or met any other Chinese person who considered, the Xinnie meme racist.
I have. Especially in the context most westerners use it. You’re welcome.
And I know Indians who don’t think swastikas are racist. Doesn’t mean racists don’t use symbols and images as a trojan horse for racism.
Removed by mod
deleted by creator
Oh bother!
