Composite Pic of Obama-Xi and Pooh-Tigger Deleted by Weibo
By wchung | 07 May, 2025

A post comparing a photo of Presidents Obama and Xi Jinping during their recent Sunnylands walk-talk session with one of Tigger and Winnie the Pooh was quickly deleted from Sina Weibo, suggesting the current level of censorship and the sensitivities of those monitoring China’s top microblogging site.

The composite photo had been posted Tuesday by a female Hong Kong user named Nicaragua Rabbit. Upon discovering that it had been deleted, she reposted the webmaster’s message explaining the reason for the deletion: “The post is inappropriate to be published,” with the comment, “Little secretary [webmaster] is stingy and lacks of sense of humor.”

The photo had already been reposted on numerous other sites. Word of its Weibo deletion helped it go viral.

“Sina killed so many Winnie the Poohs and Tiggers yesterday,” commented Innovations Works founder Kai-Fu Lee, one of China’s most respected internet celebrities. “It is a positive cartoon and nothing bad about it. Why did Sina make such brutal slaughter?”

The controversy caught the attention of the British tabloid The Sun as well as various overseas Chinese media like DW News and South China Morning Post which sniffed that if China’s social media censors had a bit of a sense of humor, the Xi-Pooh composite photo might even have helped endear China’s leader to his people.

But the deletion is probably less a reflection of the webmaster’s sense of humor so much as his sense that Sina may sacrifice his job in order to appease government censors assigned to monitor China’s popular online discussions.