(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.
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.
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.
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."
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:
"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.
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
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.
"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"
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
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.
For what it's worth, I've never even noticed the skin colour connotation as I just laughed at the matching stance the two of them shared and moved on. I think the people that immediately noticed that over the obvious comedy are telling on themselves and their own latent racist ideas.
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.
Tankies desperately trying to distract from the fact that Xi Jinping is literally the depiction of a beloved stuffed teddy bear come to life as described by the poet A. A. Milne and animated by Disney
Sure, 90% of you guys over there are racists and have a huge racism problem but don't go apply your racist shit to everyone internationally.
I'll continue having Xi an Pooh synonymous because I'm not racist and can actually do things in life without trying to make it about ""race"".
P.S.
God, where did Americans even get the idea that Asians look yellow?? Most of my family is Asian and is black. I know Asians who are paler than me (German).
It's like I'd color my face blue and someone calls me a racist, discriminating penguins.
Have white people, the dominant race in The West for centuries now, ever been enslaved / racially abused / seen as lesser people because of their skin? Is walking around in any way dangerous for a white person just because of their skin color? We in The West have experienced a dominant white culture through decades of racism and colonialism. White thinking is, to this day, the dominant power structure in Western countries. To say racism against white people can't happen, is indeed stupid. Individual white people can be hurt by statements made against their race. But it will never hurt the social-economic and priviliged status of the white person in current western society.
Read up on the Yellow Peril to learn why it is highly problematic to call Asians 'yellow' and why no similar campaign has ever been started to dehumanize white people.
Have white people, the dominant race in The West for centuries now, ever been enslaved / racially abused / seen as lesser people because of their skin? Is walking around in any way dangerous for a white person just because of their skin color?
Yes absolutely, enslavement obviously not on the scale of black people, but if you say that stuff never happened to white people you're ignoring a large part of the world. Racism against whites is very much a thing in Africa, Asia and probably all other non western countries
Point taken on the enslavement on white people in history. I knew someone would probably pop up to say this. It doesn't change my point about current day white supremacy in Western thinking.
I do heavily doubt that institutional and societal racism against white people happens on the same scale as the Western institutional racism against non-whites, though. As I said above, racism from individual to individual may very well happen. It is the power dynamic involved in racism that changes the impact of it.
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...
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.
…didn’t this meme start in China? Pretty crucial context here lol.
Yeah. As always, white-savior OP is whitewashing things and taking them outside of context to make everything about race
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".
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.
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.
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."
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.
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:
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
The libs downvoting this post en masse 🤣🤣🤣🤣
-burguer liberals using a dumb, fat foodie as an insult
-they don't see the irony
pottery
"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"
::: spoiler Anti-Asian Racism A liberal once made an anti-CPC song with the lyrics "They say ching chang chong and oppress Hong Kong" :::
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.
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.
For what it's worth, I've never even noticed the skin colour connotation as I just laughed at the matching stance the two of them shared and moved on. I think the people that immediately noticed that over the obvious comedy are telling on themselves and their own latent racist ideas.
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
Tankies desperately trying to distract from the fact that Xi Jinping is literally the depiction of a beloved stuffed teddy bear come to life as described by the poet A. A. Milne and animated by Disney
Stop sucking Xi dick for once in your life.
Defending racism is the battle you want to fight, really?
Oh no the local edgelord has arrived guys
Please excuse my not caring about alleged racism directed at a totalitarian shit stain.
The whole circus has arrived with them
Just scrolled past this on All.
Americans should be contained be the SCP.
Sure, 90% of you guys over there are racists and have a huge racism problem but don't go apply your racist shit to everyone internationally.
I'll continue having Xi an Pooh synonymous because I'm not racist and can actually do things in life without trying to make it about ""race"".
P.S. God, where did Americans even get the idea that Asians look yellow?? Most of my family is Asian and is black. I know Asians who are paler than me (German).
It's like I'd color my face blue and someone calls me a racist, discriminating penguins.
What about not coloring a white man's face leaving it white? Also racist?
Have white people, the dominant race in The West for centuries now, ever been enslaved / racially abused / seen as lesser people because of their skin? Is walking around in any way dangerous for a white person just because of their skin color? We in The West have experienced a dominant white culture through decades of racism and colonialism. White thinking is, to this day, the dominant power structure in Western countries. To say racism against white people can't happen, is indeed stupid. Individual white people can be hurt by statements made against their race. But it will never hurt the social-economic and priviliged status of the white person in current western society.
Read up on the Yellow Peril to learn why it is highly problematic to call Asians 'yellow' and why no similar campaign has ever been started to dehumanize white people.
Yes absolutely, enslavement obviously not on the scale of black people, but if you say that stuff never happened to white people you're ignoring a large part of the world. Racism against whites is very much a thing in Africa, Asia and probably all other non western countries
Source?
Point taken on the enslavement on white people in history. I knew someone would probably pop up to say this. It doesn't change my point about current day white supremacy in Western thinking.
I do heavily doubt that institutional and societal racism against white people happens on the same scale as the Western institutional racism against non-whites, though. As I said above, racism from individual to individual may very well happen. It is the power dynamic involved in racism that changes the impact of it.