Peppa Pig has been removed from popular short-video platform Douyin. Many users discovered that video clips containing Peppa Pig had been deleted and a search of the popular cartoon produced no results.
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In the meantime, a list of banned content that looks to be Douyin's official policy has started to circulate in cyberspace, including Peppa Pig, along with nudity, men dressing as women, displays of firearms, cult preachings and other controversial content.
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Tt's true the hashtag #PeppaPig has been removed from Douyin. Previously there were at least 30,000 video clips under this hashtag.
The cartoon pig has been quite popular among Chinese children since it entered the Chinese market in 2015, but it has gone viral thanks to young adults only in the past few months, starting in late 2017.
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The online fad has made the piglet become an unexpected cultural icon of shehuiren subculture in China.
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Shehuiren literally means "society person," but in the online context, it refers to people who run counter to the mainstream value and are usually poorly educated with no stable job. They are unruly slackers roaming around and the antithesis of the young generation the Party tries to cultivate.
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Boom and Disappearance
It takes a stretch of imagination to link the innocent Peppa Pig with China's shehuiren subculture, but since the piglet went viral in China, it has caused a lot of controversies.
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The first video that became popular online in China was Peppa learning how to whistle: when Peppa found that everyone apart from her, including her "bestie" Susie Sheep, could whistle, Peppa felt betrayed and hung up the phone on Susie immediately. Netizens commented that this story shows "how fake friendships work."
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Afterward, Peppa Pig emojis and spoof video clips with dubbing became widespread. For example, one video with the slogan "Tattoos on Peppa, claps for fella" went viral online.
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Subsequently, tagged with the slogan, users began to post photos of their Peppa tattoos, mostly not real tattoo but rather stick-on tattoos, as well as other Peppa products, on Chinese social media platforms, including Douyin.
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"All of my classmates draw Peppa Pig on their arms," an 18-year-old high school student in Beijing surnamed Zhang Said.
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Monitoring and Leading
At first glance, there is a great contrast between pink and childish Peppa Pig and the shehuiren gangsters. But their combination shows the power of online subcultures among young people, experts said.
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However, it is also suggested that Chinese society should also be understanding toward the subcultures of young people. "Young people's behaviors contain the spirit of innovation, which promotes the development of society," he said.
Understanding Peppa Pig from an adult's perspective and recreating the cartoon has made the little pig a "society guy," which is actually different from the modern citizen image that China advocates.
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Source | Global Times
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