Yes, but it's a different "mao": the one in the picture is 貓 "cat", and the one from the name of the chairman is 毛 "hair". They don't sound exactly the same, but close enough to allow this sort of wordplay, specially in Mandarin:
The links are all Wiktionary audio; focus on the Mandarin column, and note how the pitch stays high for the first word (as if saying "hey, it's mao!") and the second one starts low, but rises sharply (as if saying "is this... mao?"). I've also included Cantonese pronunciations for reference (same spelling, different language).
With this version to compare with, it looks like someone went out of their way to edit the eyes of the one in the post to make it more of a racist caricature...
But Mao is already Chinese for cat!
Yes, but it's a different "mao": the one in the picture is 貓 "cat", and the one from the name of the chairman is 毛 "hair". They don't sound exactly the same, but close enough to allow this sort of wordplay, specially in Mandarin:
The links are all Wiktionary audio; focus on the Mandarin column, and note how the pitch stays high for the first word (as if saying "hey, it's mao!") and the second one starts low, but rises sharply (as if saying "is this... mao?"). I've also included Cantonese pronunciations for reference (same spelling, different language).
Yeah I know, I can speak Mandarin but hopefully this will help someone else!
Sorry, I didn't know you speak it. (I have a really frequent tendency to derail discussions into "let's talk languages".)
I also hope it helps someone else.
I just hope you didn't feel you wasted your efforts haha. Learning Chinese is pretty fun and relatively easy compared to others I've learned.
If anyone wants, I have practically the same picture, in a wallpaper format:
With this version to compare with, it looks like someone went out of their way to edit the eyes of the one in the post to make it more of a racist caricature...
Yeah.
...goddammit, not even wordplays are left alone.
Got my pfp removed on XHS for this 😔