2019 is the year the Winnie the Pooh shit started.
Call me crazy but I have never thought that shit was organic "from Chinese people on their internet". This makes me even more suspicious about its origins.
There was a meme passed around on Weibo, but it wasn't the same meme the west uses at all, and wasn't even censored to my knowledge. The west just made up a story whole cloth about Xi Jinping banning Winnie the Pooh and just expected people to never fact check it (they didn't.) I think it may have been a kind of "testing the waters" thing, they wanted to see how much they could get away with, they started pushing the Xinjiang stuff much more heavily shortly after, so it's likely they were seeing if people would believe an obvious and easily disprovable lie before moving onto their big lie.
Yeah, they rarely make things up by themselves, they just take existing shitty ideas that serve their purposes and give them a megaphone. That way it gives them plausible deniability.