Beijing Watch | How a Toy Cicada Triggered Huawei's Streisand Effect

A bamboo toy that sells for a few yuan has turned into an unlikely public relations headache for Huawei, after the Chinese tech giant filed a wave of takedown complaints against social media posts referencing the toy, only to watch the crackdown supercharge the very meme it was trying to kill.

The toy in question, known in Mandarin as "zhú zhī liǎo," or bamboo cicada, is a simple children's noisemaker: a bamboo tube strung with cotton thread that produces a repeated "wa-wa" croak when shaken. In late July, Chinese internet users noticed that the sound bore an uncanny resemblance to the synchronized, exaggerated gasps of "wow" that erupt from live audiences at Huawei product launches, particularly ones staged around catchphrases from Yu Chengdong, Huawei's executive director and chairman of its consumer devices unit. Yu is best known for declaring, at the launch of the Aito M9 sport utility vehicle, that it was "the best SUV under 10 million yuan."

Remix videos followed almost immediately, pairing footage of the shaking toy with captions like "the best toy under 10 million yuan," or splicing in Yu's voice alongside his other signature line, "leading by a wide margin." What started as an inside joke among a small circle of internet users spread quickly, and so did Huawei's response.

Takedown Notices Target Even Unrelated Toy Videos

Multiple creators have said publicly on Chinese social platforms that they received removal notices for videos that simply showed off the bamboo toy, without mentioning Huawei, Yu, or any of the company's products by name.

Complaint notices circulating online and reviewed by multiple users name the complainant as Huawei Device Co. Ltd. The stated grounds were consistent: the content allegedly used "insinuation, mapping, homophones and altered audio" to mock, disparage or ridicule the company and its executives, and was specific enough that the public could still identify the target, thereby lowering their public standing. Where platforms asked for supporting evidence, the field was frequently filled in with just one word: "other."

The removals were not limited to overt parody. Plain demonstration videos of the toy also disappeared in batches. Searches for the toy's name briefly returned almost nothing on Weibo, while Douyin, Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu and WeChat public accounts all reported a surge of account restrictions. On August 2, a hashtag asking whether pulling down the parody videos amounted to overreaction trended on Weibo's hot search list, drawing some state-linked outlets to defend Huawei's actions.

The complaints did not make the toy disappear. They made it a sensation. Sales of the bamboo cicada surged on Chinese e-commerce platforms including Pinduoduo, Taobao and JD.com, with sellers working Yu's catchphrase into their listings by swapping in a homophone that plays on the word "shake."

Some fans went further, donning green fish-mouth masks in reference to Yu's nickname, "Big Mouth Yu," and posing outside Huawei retail stores with the toy in hand. Others swapped their profile pictures for national flags before continuing to post. A once-obscure nostalgia item became a symbol anyone online could join in on, with no login required beyond a shared sense of the joke.

Analysts and commentators who have weighed in on the episode describe it as a textbook case of the Streisand effect, in which an attempt to suppress information ends up amplifying it. Long-simmering public frustration with Huawei's image, they argue, is what turned a cheap toy into a rallying point once the company moved to shut the joke down through legal complaints rather than defusing it with humor or a shrug.

Some mainland lawyers interviewed by Chinese media have noted that content does not need to name a company or executive directly to expose them to a reputational claim. If the overall presentation makes the target clearly identifiable to the public, they say, it can still count as harming business reputation or personal standing, a legal theory companies have increasingly leaned on to push platforms toward removals.

The sharper debate, though, is not over whether Huawei had the legal standing to complain but over how far it stretched that standing. Because some deleted posts featured nothing but the toy itself, with no reference to Huawei's name at all, many internet users have begun asking whether platforms, faced with a flood of complaints, erred toward removing anything remotely adjacent rather than assessing each post on its merits. That question, over what actually counts as insinuation, has become its own public argument.

Huawei's product launches have built a reputation over recent years for produced, high-energy crowd reactions. Whenever a new product, feature or price point is unveiled, the venue tends to erupt in a dense, remarkably uniform chorus of "wow." Supporters read that as genuine enthusiasm for the company's innovation; skeptics see a staged reaction ripe for editing into a recurring internet joke. The bamboo cicada's own rhythmic "wa-wa" call happened to line up neatly with clips from those events, handing it a new context almost overnight.

Companies have traditionally fought reputational threats framed as disinformation or clear infringement. Increasingly, the threats look more like this one: memes, wordplay, remix videos and even repurposed sound clips that sit somewhere between comedy and mockery. That ambiguity leaves companies with an uncomfortable choice. Ignore it, and a brand risks being chipped away at by inside jokes. Fight it aggressively, and the fight itself can look like an overreaction, pulling in an audience that never would have found the joke otherwise.

For Huawei, the more consequential outcome may not be how many videos it succeeded in pulling down, but how many people who had never heard of the bamboo cicada now know exactly what it is, and why, because of the company's own response. In an era when a joke's staying power often has less to do with how funny it is than with whether someone with the power to erase it tries to, Huawei may have picked the one strategy guaranteed to keep the joke alive. （Related： HNS 2026 | Huawei Unveils Upgraded Xinghe AI Campus Solution for Southern Africa ｜ Latest ）

​Original Article in Chinese​