Oba-Mao: Beijing in a tizzy over a T-shirt

(Watch Josh Chin's video report on the Obama visit.)

Was it Chinese government officials worried about offending their guest, or White House PR flacks anxious to prevent the Tea Party people adding another image to their posters?

Whatever the reason, the above t-shirt depicting Barack Obama as a Chinese revolutionary hero has been ordered removed from the shelves of ironic hipster clothing shops throughout Beijing in advance of the U.S. president's first trip to China.

According to a report in Hong Kong's Ming Pao newspaper (translation here courtesy of China Digital Times), local shop owners received calls last week from the Beijing Municipal Government requesting they stop selling the item poste haste.

The shirt shows a socialist-realist Obama decked out in a Cultural Revolution-era Red Guard uniform and striking a Mao-like pose over that most famous of the Chairman's slogans: "Serve The People." (Incidentally, it was featured in a GlobalPost video on Obama's impending visit to Beijing, filmed shortly after the ban was introduced).

Your correspondent attempted to interview the man who originally dreamed up the so-called ObaMao image, designer Liu Mingjie, but was rebuffed. The t-shirt appears to have been banned shortly after Liu appeared in this story on the front page of the state-run China Daily's Metro section.

Obama is supposed to arrive in China on November 15th and is scheduled to stay four days. According to Ming Pao, the shirts can go back on sale after he leaves.

Where the ban order ultimately came from, nobody knows. But if the aim was to keep the image out of the GOP's eye, the Beijing t-shirt police seem to have failed.

As often happens in China, it's not until something is banned that it truly takes off. 

http://www.globalpost.com/notebook/china-and-its-neighbors/091113/oba-mao-beijing-tizzy-over-t-shirt