US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has denied there is any deeper meaning or jab at China's President Xi Jinping contained in a photo of his dog he tweeted.
At first it looks like nothing more than a cute dog photo shared by the Secretary of State’s personal twitter account.
‘Mercer and all of her favorite toys!’ the caption reads with a little dog emoji.
But it didn’t take long for social media users to notice that the soft toy front and centre was a well-chewed fluffy Winnie the Pooh bear from the popular children’s books and television series by the same name.
That led some to think Mr Pompeo was having a crack at the Chinese President, who has long been derogatorily nicknamed Winnie the Pooh because of his alleged likeness to the cuddly bear.
AA Milne's loveable but slow-witted bear with a weakness for honey picked up as a meme after pictures of President Xi Jinping alongside slender former US president Barack Obama, who drew comparisons to Winnie's friend Tigger, were published.
China has since sought to scrub the meme from the internet accessible inside the country, and Beijing in 2018 rejected the release of the Disney film Christopher Robin, which stars Winnie.
Mr Pompeo has championed a hard line against China, criticising the communist leadership for denying free expression, clamping down in Hong Kong and failing to stop the coronavirus pandemic.
When asked about whether the photo had a deeper meaning, Mr Pompeo laughed off the suggestion.
A photo of President Xi Jinping and Barack Obama prompted the comparisons to the AA Milne characters. Source: Twitter
"No, I imagine there were a series of stuffed animals, and they were equally distributed for Mercer's benefit," Mr Pompeo told Iowa conservative radio host Simon Conway.
Mr Pompeo’s post comes during heightened tensions between the United States and China over the latter’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which originated in Wuhan, China.
There have also been other points of contention between the world’s two major superpowers, with trade, technology, human rights abuses against ethnic minorities in China and the independence of Hong Kong also sore spots in the relationship.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo denied there was any hidden message in the photo. Source: AAP
On Wednesday Mr Pompeo announced the US would impose visa restrictions on Chinese technology firms, calling them a “Trojan horse” for Chinese government spying.
This included popular Chinese smartphone company Huawei, which he described as “an arm of the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance state that censors political dissidents and enables mass internment camps in Xinjiang and the indentured servitude of its population shipped all over China.”
