i recall reading that the winnie the pooh thing started off because a bunch of hong kong liberals were paying notions to racism by saying "xi must be winnie the pooh, because obama is a tigger!(which i can only imagine they want to replace T with N being their butt of the joke)" which goddamn i can only imagine how feverishly fox like these people are with their nodding gestures laced in race hate
I think in the beginning it was more innocuous than that. It was more like "haha look at this photo of these two walking next to each other it looks like this picture of Pooh and Tigger" (without any racist intent... I think) but the Pooh thing got picked up by Hong Kong liberals and sinophobes and they began running it into the ground.
It absolutely was not, the comparison came from the anti-CPC crowd in Hong Kong, who are quite likely to have intended the implications of comparing a black man to Tigger.