Kong Yiji vs Winnie the Pooh.

In China, "In mid-March, a Communist Youth League and CCTV joint social post targeting a self-deprecating 'Kong Yiji' meme by young netizens who joked their academic degrees made them 'unemployable', is making the country's restive youth furious. A month later, with the censors having miserably failed to prevent the meme going viral, the skittish party-state now fears millions of unemployed youth might get swamped by a subversive social movement." "Kong Yiji, a Chinese short story first serialized in a Beijing news weekly in 1919," "is a disillusioned scholar who is constantly ridiculed and often beaten up (for stealing books) at a tavern he regularly visits." "Taiwanese are rushing to buy patches being worn by their air force pilots that depict a Formosan black bear punching Winnie the Pooh - representing China's President Xi Jinping - as a defiant symbol of the island's resistance to Chinese war games." Reuters. In 2017, "The blocking of Winnie the Pooh might seem like a bizarre move by the Chinese authorities but it is part of a struggle to restrict clever bloggers from getting around their country's censorship. When is a set of wrist watches not just a set of wrist watches? When is a river crab not just a river crab? Inside the Great Firewall of China of course." BBC. In 2018, "China banned 'N' as part of a widespread censorship clampdown that occurred after word got out...that presidential limits might be dropped, allowing Chinese President Xi Jinping possibly to stay in power indefinitely." CNN. "In addition to banning use of the letter 'N' online, words such as 'immortality' and 'ascend the throne' were also deemed inappropriate to use on the internet." China can censor the internet inside its own borders but not in other countries. It can only react with fury. "Western media reports on China's population being overtaken by India deliberately ignores China's development, using the topic to 'bad mouth' it and advocate decoupling, state broadcaster CCTV said." Reuters. Decoupling was forced on the world by China's aggressive 'zero Covid policy' which enforced total shutdown of major cities creating enormous supply chain disruptions and resulting in shortages of manufactured goods and inflation. HT. Also, Western countries have reluctantly woken up to China's cyber espionage and hacking by the People's Liberation Army (PLA) unit 61398 based in Shanghai. Reuters. On 18 April 2023, the FBI "arrested two men on charges that they helped establish a secret police station in New York on behalf of the Chinese government, and about three dozen officers with China's national police force were charged with using social media to harass dissidents inside the United States, authorities said." FP. Apparently, there are 102 such 'overseas police stations' in 53 nations around the world. Perhaps it is a good thing that the Chinese population is dropping. Make it easier to spy on them.