There’s a new Milk Tea shop near our house and I couldn’t help but notice that Winnie the Pooh is out promoting it. This might seem like the kind of innocuous copyright infringement that often occurs here but in Asia the combination of Winnie the Pooh and Milk Tea are actually a meaningful political statement.

How is Winnie the Pooh political?

It all started with a silly meme back in 2013 comparing Winnie the Pooh and Tigger going on a walk to a real photo of Chinese President Xi Jinping walking with President Obama.

The next year, in 2014, there was yet another silly meme comparing Eeyore and Winnie the Pooh shaking hands to a real photo of Japanese President Shinzo Abe and President Xi Jinping.

According to Global Risks Insights, in 2015 the single most censored image on the Chinese internet was this comparison of a Winnie the Pooh toy car and President Xi Jinping in a military parade. There’s a great article from the BBC that goes into this in more depth.

The memes themselves are silly and cute, but what’s given them lasting political meaning was the response of the Chinese government. These images were heavily censored on the Chinese internet. It’s not true, as some have claimed, that Winnie the Pooh is completely banned in China. Winnie the Pooh still runs on state television and there’s still a Winnie the Pooh ride at Disneyland Shanghai, but the bear is often blacklisted on Chinese search engines and social media. Any perceived comparison of Winnie the Pooh and Xi Jinping is completely censored.

The internet perceived the sometimes heavy censorship of Winnie the Pooh as sensitivity and made even more memes.

How is Milk Tea political?

During the 2019-2020 Kong Kong protests, a Thai actor named Vachirawit Chivaaree reposted an image on Twitter that listed Hong Kong as an independent country rather than a region of China. This lead to a chain of events – you can read the details on Wikipedia if you’re interested – that united youth democracy activists from Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Myanmar in an online solidary movement. This online democratic solidary movement became known as the Milk Tea Alliance.

While I followed the Hong Kong protests closely, I didn’t become aware of the Milk Tea Alliance until we started connecting with youth peacebuilders online following the coup in Myanmar and hearing about it from them. (Note: we’ve only been connecting with youth peacebuilders in Myanmar, they are a minority among the youth pro-democracy movement and a growing number of youth activists have taken up arms against the military.)

You can find the full ‘How the Milk Tea Alliance is remaking Myanmar’ article here.

These youth are the first internet age generation to become adults in their country and they have a very different mindset from previous generations. In my opinion, they are not naïve – they know very well what happened to their compatriots in Hong Kong – but rather desperate.

Winnie the Pooh and Milk Tea too

I don’t know that the shop owner here in Phnom Penh meant to be political by having Winnie the Pooh advertise a Milk Tea shop. Normally, I’d be tempted to visit and try to learn a bit more. But I’m not going to do that during a pandemic. Yaun Tea is a Taiwanese Milk Tea chain so I think the choice of Winnie the Pooh was intentional somewhere along the decision making chain.

The Milk Tea Alliance started in Taiwan, Thailand, Myanmar, and Hong Kong but has since has picked up momentum in South Korea, the Philippines, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Belarus and Iran. It has not picked up momentum here in Cambodia as far as I’m aware but young people do love drinking Milk Tea/Bubble Tea.

Welcome new readers?

Also, if you want to feel paranoid, analytics showed that I got three views from China (one for each image) as soon as I uploaded the meme images above. (Even before I made the post public.)

I’m on a secure VPN and my site is hosted by servers in California so…that’s a surprise. But I think I know how the image uploads got out there – the blog uses a cloud CDN service to speed up image loading – but it’s disturbing to think that the CDN service is being monitored somehow. I’ll have to check into how…and where…the CDN is storing images.