• Valbrandur@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.

      • JucheBot1988@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        Tigger

        I remember that meme showing up on r/blursedimages, and Le Aberage Redditors were absolutely making the connection.

        • PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmygrad.ml
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          1 year ago

          Well, as JucheBot noticed le average redditor instantly connected the dots so i would say it’s purposeful by and for those kind of people. For all we know it might be made by some shit like Serpentza or some local colonized lib. Their numerous presence is confirmed even in China. Also i don’t think i like the suggestion that Chinese don’t know english.

          • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            Le average redditor is probably a native English speaker

            Also i don’t think i like the suggestion that Chinese don’t know english.

            “Knowing English” and “making subtle references that only work if everyone thinks of a cartoon character’s English name” are very different things. I assume that most people seeing Tigger will think of whatever his name is in their native language, regardless of how many languages they speak. You generally don’t cycle through different words in every language you know every time you see an image looking to find a pun.

            It’s possible but it’s a really big stretch. It’s definitely not the main thing to be criticizing when people are painting an Asian person’s skin yellow.

      • ButtigiegMineralMap@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • alcoholicorn [comrade/them, doe/deer]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          Yeah, there’s a huge network of far-right media run by/targeting Chinese diaspora, some of which filters back into mainland China. It’s how BLM got roughly translated into “black people are expensive” in chinese media.

          But whether chinese people made that connection or not is irrelevent, this isn’t about chinese people on wechat, it’s about westerners on reddit who absolutely did make that connection.

      • Valbrandur@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        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.