The Chinese government has nothing against gay pandas, if there are any such creatures. But it doesn’t want anybody to be picking quarrels and provoking trouble by talking about gay pandas (The Washington Post, January 21, 2026).
As it cracks down on dating apps for gays and gay advocacy groups, China is also detaining people for spreading rumors about pandas and the city of Chengdu, sometimes called Gaydu.
Two Chinese men who allegedly produced and shared an AI-manipulated photo of two pandas from the panda capital of Chengdu displaying homosexual behavior have been detained, in what officials call a crackdown on attempts to “maliciously associate” gayness with certain Chinese cities.
The southwestern city of Chengdu, in addition to being known for its panda base, has one of the most vibrant and permissive cultures in China.
The suspects, a 29-year-old from the northeastern rust-belt province of Liaoning and a 33-year-old from the eastern tech hub of Hangzhou, are accused of posting on social media an allegedly AI-modified photo purporting to be of a news report showing one male panda mounting another in a captive environment. The caption reads: “Chengdu: Two male Sichuan giant pandas successfully mate for the first time without [human] intervention.”
The two have been detained and their social media accounts suspended, local police said in a statement, which went on to accuse the suspects of “spreading…fake news” that “triggered a flood of misinterpretations, disrupted the order of cyberspace, and caused adverse social impact.”
The ”suspects.”
Sounds as if cyberspace might have gotten sucked into a black hole or something as a result of this wanton photo manipulation. More likely, any post that the government wants to censor is therefore regarded as “disrupting the order of cyberspace.” We can add this phrase to the list of at least hundreds of other quarrel-picking CCP phrases routinely deployed to obliterate thought.
Other targets of the campaign to save the order of cyberspace from satire and gayness include a 25-year-old Sichuan man detained for “posting videos that allegedly ‘insinuated’ men in Chengdu lack masculinity” and a 23-year-old Shandong man “known on social media for street interviews where he tries to chat up and flirt with male pedestrians and subway passengers…. Police say he is a straight man queerbaiting to attract more traffic.”
The police have detained these people. For how long, the reports don’t say.
