In all the years I’ve been around, both on the internet & among friends and acquaintances from Asia (incl. Taiwan & China), WtP has been a symbol of resistance against Xi Jin Ping and authoritarianism in China.
I know .ml is heavily tankie in general, but just need a double check from the more reasonable parts of the internet.
Originally it was just netizens comparing Xi to Pooh because they thought it was cute. But Xi has no sense of humor and banned the comparison. Now people use it to annoy CCP sympathizers. It’s not racist at all, the original intention of the comparison was good willed and innocent.
Wikipedia’s english language article on the subject links to a BBC article from 2017 by Stephen McDonell, their China correspondent. He has his own Wikipedia article. You can read there that his reporting caused a warning to ABC (back in 2014 when he worked for ABC) from the chinese embassy. I don’t know what this entails exactly but anyway those were some facts
In his farewell to ABC he mentions being saved by the PLA while in NK, that seems balanced to me, although that is just a surface level read from me, I don’t otherwise know the guy
Also there’s that kind of thing