They're not.

That meme was invented in China, by Chinese netizens.

Xi didn't like being poked fun at, and added it to the list of censored phrases/images/concepts.

EDIT:

It then later spread to the Western internet, who then memed it further... then China got real mad, did the Great Firewall of China thing real hard...

... and nowadays, we here in the West have a bunch of self described 'leftists' who seem to believe the whole thing was a racist Western meme from the start.

It wasn't.

It was meant to convey Xi as basically derpy, lackadaisical, oafish, childish.

Thats what the CCP took offense to... not any racial stereotypes.

Japanese netizens soon also concluded that their PM at the time, Shinzo Abe, bore a significant resemblance to Eeyore... presumably due to the bags under his eyes, and just generally looking old and tired.

It was based on real world images of Xi meeting Obama. Obama was Tigger, Xi was Pooh, they looked to be walking, ambling along in a good mood.

Here it is, the first iteration of the meme, originating in 2013... from Weibo, a Chinese social media site, sort of similar to Facebook:

... The Chinese user drew Pooh and Tigger, this is not a frame from some previously existing media.

Perhaps unlike a lot of younger modern internet users... I followed all this in real time, I'd graduated uni a year or two prior, was still in my prime shitposting years.

Everyone these days who thinks the whole thing is inherently racist, has always been that way... No.

I remember being on reddit, and us westoids being amused by an, at that time, fairly rare, huge viral meme in China, that was so viral that it made it all the way over to us.

Here's the Twitter post that introduced it to the West:

Ya'll can stop rewriting history, or working yourselves up into hysterics about this... any time you like!

The meme has since grown, again, in China, to basically be a symbol of resistance, given how hard it's been banned, as well as a symbol of opposition to thr CCP in other East Asian and South East Asian countries.

If the whole thing was that... Pooh is yellow, and ... therefore this a racist cariacature... why are Chinese dissidents and citizens of other Asian countries using it as they do?

EDIT 2: I've literally been banned from much of Hexbear and ML, in the past, for pointing this out.

They're just delusional about this.