Lunar New Year puts seal on Peppa Pig’s Chinese comeback
- When even filmmakers and the army are getting in on the act, there’s no doubt that the popular cartoon character is the face of the Year of the Pig
Everywhere you look in China, it is hard to avoid Peppa Pig.
The popular British children’s character has become the unofficial mascot of the Year of the Pig, cementing her global popularity and sealing her return to favour in China.
A Chinese-language version of the cartoon first aired on state broadcaster CCTV in 2015 and became an overnight sensation among younger audiences, notching up more than 60 billion views on television and streaming websites.
But Peppa soon become one of the more unlikely victims of China’s censorship machinery that saw the cartoon being dropped from a popular video-sharing site altogether and denounced in state media as a bad influence.
The problem was that the character had been adopted as a symbol of slacker culture by disaffected millennials – some of whom even went so far as to get Peppa tattoos.
