Chinese Panda Wearing Oxygen Mask — Panda meme with human face wearing an oxygen mask surrounded by cartoon oxygen tanks.

Chinese Panda Wearing Oxygen Mask

2021reaction imagesemi-active

Published August 12, 2026

Chinese Panda Wearing Oxygen Mask is a biaoqing reaction image showing a cartoon panda head hooked up to an oxygen tank, used in Chinese chats since 2021 and picked up by Western meme circles in March 2023 as a Copium-adjacent gag14.

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Overview

Chinese Panda Wearing Oxygen Mask is a Chinese biaoqing, or chat sticker, showing the classic Panda Head reaction face wearing a cartoon oxygen mask attached to a tank4. In Chinese it goes by 吸氧熊猫, meaning Oxygen-absorbing Panda4. The joke reads roughly the way Copium does in English, a wheezing signal that the sender is barely surviving whatever they just saw.

The image belongs to the wider Panda Head biaoqing family that fills WeChat and Weibo group chats, and it was later grouped with other oxygen-themed stickers in dedicated emoji packs5. Western audiences encountered it in March 2023 during a wave of Twitter discourse comparing Chinese reaction images to Wojak Comics1.

Origin & Background

Platform
Wxcha / WeChat (biaoqing pack) / Twitter (Western spread)
Date
2021

The visual gag traces back to CCTV host Sa Beining (撒贝宁). On February 17th, 2019, Sa appeared on air holding a small oxygen mask and told viewers he sometimes had to lie on the sofa and inhale from a tank because his workload was so tiring2. A clip of the bit was reuploaded to Bilibili on December 24th, 2021 with a cartoon overlay drawn on top of him showing the mask and hose3.

On September 1st, 2021, Wxcha published an Oxygen-absorbing funny WeChat emoji pack that bundled a Sa Beining GIF alongside a Panda Head biaoqing edited to wear the same oxygen mask, which is the exact image now known in English as Chinese Panda Wearing Oxygen Mask5. The underlying Panda Head sticker itself had already circulated on Wxcha in a different pack posted on March 20th, 20215.

How It Spread

Early cross-posts of the Sa Beining oxygen edit reached Instagram user @yun_zuzuru on August 11th, 2019, and Twitter user @Moneyayoho shared the oxygen-absorbing panda biaoqing on November 22nd, 201989. For several years it stayed a niche Chinese-language sticker rather than a Western meme.

That changed in March 2023 when Western Twitter began arguing about Chinese reaction images versus Wojak Comics. On March 19th, 2023, @HumbuggHere tweeted the panda with the caption, "Chinese reaction images are insane like what context do you even use this in," pulling in roughly 115,400 likes over five days1. The next day, @thedarkprowler used it with a Chinese caption translating as, "My look when retarded white people try to rap at events like Eminem," gathering about 3,200 likes in four days6.

The format kept jumping platforms from there. On March 22nd, 2023, iFunny user @KaiserXeno posted a "When You Outside and Smell That Zaza" edit of the biaoqing that pulled around 3,000 smiles in two days7. After that burst it settled into steady reaction-image duty on Western timelines alongside other Panda Head biaoqing.

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How to Use This Meme

Chinese Panda Wearing Oxygen Mask is typically dropped as a standalone reply when something is so exhausting, cringe, or overwhelming that the sender jokes they need supplemental oxygen to keep reading. A common convention pairs it with a caption in the format "my face when [absurd situation]," the same slot Copium and defeated Wojak images often fill1. It often includes no edits at all, since the panda plus oxygen mask does the work on its own.

Frequently Asked Questions