China Censors John Oliver Because President Xi Looks A Bit Like Winnie The Pooh

from the thin-skinned dept

Whatever you do, don't point out that some people think China's President Xi Jinping vaguely resembles Winnie the Pooh.

HBO Comedian John Oliver recently learned this the hard way when Chinese users of popular social networking website Weibo found they weren't able to mention Oliver by name without receiving an error message stating such comments violated "rules and regulations." After that, censorship monitor GreatFire.org indicated that HBO’s website was blocked entirely for the lion's share of the country since last weekend.

The cause of China's efforts to remove Oliver from the internet? This recent twenty minute segment took a semi-deep dive into China's political leadership, noting their abolition of term limits, ongoing censorship, the routine murder and/or imprisonment of political dissidents, the country's rather terrifying implementation of "citizen scores," and oh -- the fact that some people think that Chinese President Xi has a semi-decent resemblance to a rotund, honey-adoring cartoon:

"Apparently, Xi Jinping is very sensitive about his perceived resemblance to Winnie the Pooh,” Mr. Oliver said on the show. “And I’m not even sure it’s that strong a resemblance, to be honest. But the fact he’s annoyed about it means people will never stop bringing it up."

Like most Chinese internet censorship, more technical users can get around the attempt to remove Oliver from the Chinese internet by using a VPN. That said, like Russia and other countries, China has been busy saddling VPN vendors with all manner of cumbersome restrictions as part of an effort to effectively ban the technology from widespread use. Last year, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology declared that all VPN providers now needed prior government approval to operate, imposing fines up to $2000 on companies offering "unsanctioned" VPNs (read: nearly all of them).

Of course the censorship only proves Oliver's point: that the country remains entirely intolerant to free speech, Xi has arguably thin skin, and the Chinese leader does, in fact, strike a fleeting resemblance to a certain pantless bear with self-esteem issues and an eating disorder:

Filed Under: censorship, china, free speech, john oliver, satire, winnie the pooh, xi jinping, xi jinping looks like winnie the pooh