"Stories of Animals That Talk Disliked in Hunan
""Alice in Wonderland" will in future be a banned book as far as school children in the Province of Hunan are concerned.
General Ho Chien, the Governor of the Province, has issued an official order prohibiting schools from using text-books in which conversations between animals are recorded.
"Bears, lions, and other beasts," he points out. "cannot use a human language, and to attribute to them such power is an insult to the human race. Any children reading such text-books must inevitably regard animals and human beings on the same level, and this would be disastrous.""
(The Straits Times, 22 May 1931, Page 6)
Apparently the monkey see monkey do theory of human behavior was popular even back then.