Click this link and you can get The Register banned in China They may have mown down their own students with real tanks but what really scares the Chinese government is a stuffed, furry bear with a red tank top. A movie starring Ewan McGregor came out in cinemas on Friday, and covers the frankly rather boring honey-coated story of a series of improbable animal friends doing very little …
As far as many in China are concerned He Looks EXACTLY like him.
if you spend a few months in Asia your brain changes the way you process facial information,
It's really quite interesting.
One result is that XI looks exactly like Poo, sometimes even his walk is the same, it's reported he absolutely loathes the reference.
Re: Just to be helpful:
I don't get this - Xi looks nothing like Pooh - Disney or Shepherd version.
1970es Russian version. You can find it on YouTube. It also has several double+ meaning songs where the second meaning between the lines is political and lampooning the great communist leadership. It was a form of sport to get that past the censors in those days - many of their old movies have this.
That is what got pooh-bear banned. The Disney and later versions are just collateral damage.
with our political systems here*, there’s plenty worse around elsewhere. Or at least you’re mostly allowed to criticize your local Dear Leader. Much as some of them think of the press as enemies.
Xi does happen to be competent, but dictatorships don’t always get competent bosses, not unlike the problems bequeathed by Wilhelm II or Leopold II.
I truly wonder if Xi doesn’t realize how ridiculous and Barbara Streisandy the Winnie censorship makes him look.
* for various flavors of ‘here’ as exemplified by May, Trump, Tsipras...
China, for whatever reason, has long had a quota for foreign films in its theatres. The quota started off at 10 a year in the 1990s and has been expanded to 34 today. The chances that a less than stunning movie with a character that might be taken as a parody of Chairman Xi will be one of those films are probably close to zero. Especially given President Trump's recent trade related antics and the fact that it's an American film. There are alternate mechanisms that could allow its distribution, but probably won't. See http://chinafilminsider.com/foreign-films-in-china-how-does-it-work/
Right now I'd exchange our present government for the Politburo provided we were allowed free democratic elections in 2022. Because "competent" and "British government" are disjoint sets.
Hey, we might get some decent railways, an airport or two, some more wind power, a burgeoning electric vehicle sector, some decent electronics makers and cheap Russian gas. And possibly a statement that Britain is an indissoluble part of the EU (cf Taiwan).
Sadly, based on the Hong Kong experience, the free democratic election bit is unlikely.
@Voyna i Mor
As somebody who visits there quite regularly (I have family who migrated there, from the UK, I like to add), In many ways I'd agree. I'm not talking about the communist-crush-rebellion from yester-year, but their present doctrine has delivered a lot of stability and prosperity.
As for those who would call China repressive, I'd say, first go and experience it yourself, stop listening to the press who themselves are using 3rd-hand information. Second, the UK establishment is worse in many respects, they're lying, cheating, who also block content..
Then we have the brexit camp, which seems to have all these traits as super-powers, who are also brainwashing people with xenophobia. As is perfectly timed for this article - My wife was watching Come Dine With Me on Friday (recorded from couple of weeks ago), which had a immigrant Indian woman, who said she voted Brexit, because she hates Immigrants and they're stealing all jobs!! Just wow...
Anyway, that's my Sunday morning politiks dealt with, now I need coffee
Oopsie, I was on UK-Govt-paid visit to the PRC, who I found fascinating, credible (in local circumstances) and fully authentic. I'd question when 'repressive' begins to approach close to 'broader public interest'. We, and they. elect (or whatever) authorities to make that judgement. But I'd part company on 'Brexit' - if the PRC had inherited a 'free movement' Treaty with Japan, India, Indonesia and Russia, what would their public now prefer?
>experience it yourself
Methink there is a massive difference between experiencing it as a foreigner, esp a Westerner, and as a local, specifically in the context of political freedom.
If you say the wrong thing, you’ll at worst be asked to leave and never granted a visa again.
Locals don’t “experience” it in the same way. Or, are you denying the existence of political-only prisoners in China?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_dissidents
Because all the rest really is bullshit - either a country has political prisoners or it doesn’t. That is orthogonal to other considerations like competence, excessive police force, excessive imprisonment of certain minorities. Not so much to corruption - political prisoners often end up there for decrying it.
True, the power to throw folk in jail does let you get away with a lot more too
Not only China - nice Thailand, which issues 20 yr sentences to middle aged women liking a FB post making fun of the royal dog is right up there.
So, your “all the same”? Calling BS.
I truly wonder if Xi doesn’t realize how ridiculous and Barbara Streisandy the Winnie censorship makes him look.
That may be the point. If you implement plenty of petty tyrannies, many people will get distracted from the real ones. If some of the clever kids spend their efforts bootlegging foreign films, they won't be putting them into real resistance.
I have a grudging respect for Xi. As autocrats go, he seems to have a very nuanced and careful grasp of power. His cult of personality seems to be extremely managed, not the sort of wild-eyed populism we see with Trump, for example, or even the still rather visceral "hard man is good to find" thing Putin promotes. His repressions also strike me as calculated, and often deliberately obtuse, to present a sort of circus of ineffectual resistance. Let the people enjoy inconsequential defiance as entertainment.
(Of course, this is by no means a novel technique, but as far as I'm aware it was mostly practiced systematically in pre-capitalist economies, as shown in e.g. Stallybrass & White's The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. There was a bit of it with the US Hippie movement, which was notable for achieving nothing but the neutering of a potential political opposition,1 but I suspect most of the US establishment genuinely loathed the hippies and it didn't occur to them to use the movement this way.)
1Unlike the actual civil-rights movements in the US, which did achieve significant change.
I would like to have it on record that Disney's representation of Pooh is an utter travesty of the character as written by AA Milne and as drawn by EH Shepherd. Shepherd's drawings are definitive, and Disney's transmogrification deserves to be exiled to a hell of hard radiation for all eternity.
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