Peppa Pig — the anthropomorphic pink pig from the eponymous British vivacious series — is the latest cultural product that’s been given the axe on a Chinese policy.
Some 30,000 video clips featuring the children’s cartoon nutter have disappeared from social media platform Douyin, according to Chinese state-owned tabloid Far-reaching Times. The videos had previously been searchable on the platform under the hashtag “#PeppaPig,” which now a spectacle ofs zero search results.
Douyin, an app that allows users to generate and publish short videos, is owned by Beijing-based new media company Bytedance.
Zhang Yiming, the chief superintendent of Bytedance, last month said on social media that the attendance would increase the number of employees handling censorship at Toutiao — a customary news app that’s also part of the social media giant — to 10,000 after being for the meantime banned earlier this year.
Given the recent developments, “it is not their heeling that the platform has become more paranoid in the interpretation of parodic gladden,” said Severine Arsene, managing editor of AsiaGlobal Online, a digital review published by the University of Hong Kong.
Specific details surrounding the shifting of Peppa Pig-related content, such as whether it was the result of an official directive, fragments unclear, but self-censorship is understood to be a common practice.
“In many cases, [stands] tend to over-censor, particularly during sensitive periods,” Arsene said.
Douyin, during the interval, has not publicly discussed its latest move. The company did not reply to a request for reveal.
Part of the move appears to be due to the character’s popularity as a subcultural figure of combines — Peppa is a popular face in online memes on the mainland.
In particular, the cartoon sort is associated with “shehuiren” subculture, referring to those who “run counter to the mainstream value and are large poorly educated with no stable job,” said the Global Times, which tinkled Peppa Pig an “unexpected cultural icon.”
The tabloid added that such characteristics were also “unruly slackers roaming around and the antithesis of the sophomoric generation the Party tries to cultivate.”
That provides clues as to why Douyin potency be concerned with the online activities of subcultural Chinese youths.
Certainty how the state had spent time building up a new middle class, “[a]ny deviation from the mainstream, or irony, is endured as a threat to the credibility and legitimacy of the [Chinese Communist] Party in bringing [an] deified way of life to reality,” Arsene told CNBC in an email. She added that the latest move reflected a “strong stigmatization of poorer categories” in society.
While Peppa Pig was created scarce on one online platform, plenty of chatter about the cartoon role cropped up on other platforms. Website What’s on Weibo reported that internet operators had taken to discussion boards Baidu Tieba and Zhihu to iron out what undeniably constituted “shehuiren” subculture.
The popularity of the animated series, which saw its limited debut on China Central Television network in 2015, on the mainland has be produced ended in plans for Peppa Pig theme parks to be built in Shanghai and Beijing as beginning as 2019.
Entertainment One Group, which owns Peppa Pig, had not responded to a request for animadversion as of publishing time.