It was a warm gesture on a chilly night when Vladimir Putin wrapped a shawl around the wife of Xi Jinping while the Chinese president chatted with Barack Obama. The only problem: Putin came off looking gallant, the Chinese summit host gauche and inattentive.

Worse still were off-colour jokes that began to circulate about the real intentions of the divorced Russian president – a heart-throb among many Chinese women for his macho, man-of-action image.

That was too much for the Chinese authorities.

The incident, at a performance linked to this week’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit, was originally shown on state TV and spread online as a forwarded video. But it was soon scrubbed clean from the internet in China, reflecting the intense control authorities exert over any material about the country’s leaders while also pointing to cultural differences over what is considered acceptable behaviour in public.

“China is traditionally conservative on public interaction between unrelated men and women, and the public show of consideration by Putin may provide fodder for jokes, which the big boss probably does not like,” said the Beijing-based historian and independent commentator Zhang Lifan.

Xi’s wife, Peng Liyuan, was once a popular folk singer more famous than her husband, and in contrast to her predecessors she has taken on a much more public role, prominently joining her husband on trips abroad as part of China’s soft power push to seek a global status commensurate with its economic might.

Propaganda officials have built the image of Xi and his wife as a loving couple. Photos of Xi shielding his wife from rain on a state visit, picking flowers for her, or simply holding her hand have been circulated widely on China’s social media.

“When the president personally held up the umbrella for the madam, it complies with the international norm of respecting women,” blogger Luo Qingxue wrote on the news site for the party-run newspaper People’s Daily last year after the couple were pictured on a state visit to Trinidad and Tobago.

But Putin’s intervention messed up the script on Monday night while Xi chatted with the American president.

In the video, Peng stood up, politely accepted the grey shawl offered by Putin, and thanked him with a slight bow. But she soon slipped it off and put on a black coat offered by her own attendant.

It spawned a flurry of comments on China’s social media before censors began removing any mention of the incident.

Li Xin, director of Russian and central Asian studies at the Shanghai Institute for International Studies, said Putin was just being a proper Russian and did nothing out-of-line diplomatically.

“It’s a tradition in Russia for a man of dignity to respect ladies on public occasions, and in a cold country like Russia, it is very normal that a gentleman should help ladies take on and off their coats,” Li said. “But the Chinese may not be accustomed to that.”