Pictures of Winnie the Pooh are getting banned on social media after China announces Xi Jinping may stay in power for life

REUTERS/Fred Dufour/Pool

China's President Xi Jinping looks on during a signing meeting with Maldives President Abdulla Yameen at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China December 7, 2017.

• China's ruling Communist Party wants to get rid of presidential term limits for General Secretary and President Xi Jinping.
• Chinese citizens responded by spreading memes of Winnie the Pooh, a joke that has been ongoing in China because of the leader's apparent similarity to the fictional bear.
• Chinese censors are cracking down on the memes, as well as speech that is negative of the CCP's plan to scrap term limits.

Many Chinese citizens responded in a peculiar way to Sunday's announcement that the Chinese Communist Party may get rid of presidential term limits - by posting images of Winnie the Pooh on social media.

The pictures target Xi Jinping, who could now stay in power for decades and potentially paves the way to one man rule that China has not seen since the days of Mao Zedong.

The joke is that Winnie the Pooh, the fictional living teddy bear made by English author A. A. Milne, looks strikingly similar to Xi, supposedly because both of them look somewhat chubby. Critics of the Chinese leader often use the cartoon character in a derogatory way.

The meme has been circulating around Chinese and Western social media since Xi became president in 2013, and has been out in full force since the CCP's announcement.

One image showed Pooh Bear hugging a large pot of honey, with the words "Wisdom of little bear Winnie the Pooh" in Chinese and "Find the thing you love and stick with it" in English. Another image showed a screenshot from an episode that shows the bear wearing a crown and other royal regalia.

China censors Winnie the Pooh

The memes have provoked Chinese censors to clamp down of the circulation of the cartoon bear on social media apps like WeChat and Sina Weibo.

It appears the censors are going beyond just taking down pictures of Winnie the Pooh. Entire messages relating to the topic of Xi as a dictator or negative talk about him serving for life are being deleted minutes after being sent to friends or posted online.

"I've posted this before but it was censored within 13 minutes so I will post it again," one micro-blogger wrote according to What's on Weibo, an independent news site that reports on Chinese digital and social media. "I oppose to the amendment of the 'no more than two consecutive terms of office' as addressed in the third section of Article 79 of the Constitution."

China Digital Times and Free Weibo have reported that some of the phrases that Chinese censors are scrutinizing include "I don't agree," "election term," "constitution rules," "Winnie the Pooh," and "proclaiming oneself an emperor."

"Migration" and "emigration" are also subject to heavy censorship.

State censorship is not new in China and censors have gone after Winnie the Pooh images in the past. The country has also notably gone to great lengths to make sure the Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989, in which hundreds of unarmed Chinese citizens were gunned down by the Peoples Liberation Army, are not discussed - either in person or on the internet.