34 China The EconomistAugust 24th 2019
O
n august 10tha Chinese fashion blogger, “Stylist Zoe”, invited
her 7.4m followers to take an online poll, asking whether they
would wear freshly cooked shrimp as earrings. A mere 1,300 voted.
Two days later, however, Zoe hit the jackpot. Over a million neti-
zens responded to her poll, posted on Weibo, the country’s largest
microblog platform, asking what followers think of foreign brands
that “insult China”. Her timing was impeccable. Her survey surfed
waves of patriotic indignation crashing over the Chinese internet,
heightened by puffs of windy outrage in the state media.
This tempest involves a charge new to the annals of great power
competition: that Western brands have been subverting China’s
sovereignty by means of overpriced T-shirts. Specifically, Versace,
Coach and Givenchy were denounced for selling T-shirts that vari-
ously bore the place-names Hong Kong, Macau or Taiwan, without
adding wording making it clear that the first two cities are not in
fact sovereign states, but Special Administrative Regions of the
People’s Republic of China, and without specifying that—at least
in the view of the Communist mainland—the democratic, self-go-
verning island of Taiwan is a province of China.
Not content with going after designer-shirt peddlers, state-run
news outlets have denounced Amazon for selling “Free Hong
Kong” T-shirts, though the online giant does not operate inside
China. Other well-known brands have been taken to task for drop-
down location menus on company websites that could be inter-
preted as suggesting that Hong Kong and Taiwan are countries.
To outsiders, these alleged offences may seem footling. But lux-
ury brands—whose largest single market is often China—offered
grovelling apologies. Expressions of contrition from foreign de-
signers and ceos were paraded across social-media sites, joined by
resignation letters from Chinese celebrities, noisily quitting as en-
voys for errant brands and stressing their love for the motherland.
One possible take on this dispiriting saga is that China’s hair-
trigger patriots are themselves victims. In this telling, if young
Chinese netizens are easily offended, it is because they have spent
their formative years cut off from the world behind a Great Firewall
of digital censorship, and pounded by a drumbeat of nationalism.
A closer look at those online nationalists is more troubling. It is
true that government propagandists have worked hard to whip upthislateststorm.Communist Party social-media accounts have
gleefully asserted that foreign firms must work harder to uphold
China’s sacred territorial unity, or feel the “cold, cold” wrath of
1.4bn patriotic consumers.
But a sad truth about nationalist anger is that it can be manipu-
lated and sincere at the same time. No party commissar told Stylist
Zoe’s followers to choose the most extreme response in her poll,
vowing that they would rather go naked than wear clothes from an
anti-China brand, yet 770,000 of them did so. More sobering still,
by definition those attacking foreign brands are unusually world-
ly, whether they hail from the aspiring middle classes or are mem-
bers of China’s globe-trotting elites. Those advocating boycotts
know their Versace from their Valentino. Their ringleaders also
clearly have access to the internet beyond the Great Firewall.
Brands have been attacked, in recent days, over the precise word-
ing of English-language apologies posted on platforms that are
banned in China, such as Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. That
means either overseas Chinese are involved, or netizens with ac-
cess to online tools that allow them to vault the firewall.
Some unhappy patriots hold plum jobs at the foreign compa-
nies under attack. Chaguan spoke this week to a Chinese staffer
employed by one of the firms accused of insulting China. The staff-
er described Chinese colleagues debating their firm’s actions on
WeChat, a social media app ubiquitous in China, adding that West-
ern colleagues “either didn’t dare or didn’t want to talk about it
with Chinese staff”. The firm did not set out to offend China, the
employee believes. But China’s market power deserves more defe-
rence: “If you make a profit from us, you also need to respect us.”
If recent mistakes by luxury brands seem small to foreigners,
they are missing the larger causes of Chinese anger, says “Fashion-
Models”, a blogger with 9m followers on Weibo, speaking via social
media while on a trip to Japan. America and Europe remain “cul-
turally more powerful” than China and have yet to change “their
very condescending attitude”, he says.When more than T-shirts were at stake
History offers insights into today’s online Chinese nationalism,
with its complicated blend of assertiveness and insecurity. Argu-
ably China’s first modern consumer boycott began in 1905, target-
ing American goods. It was launched by Shanghai merchants in
protest at the (very real) mistreatment of Chinese immigrants in
America. The first law against Chinese immigration was passed in- But as Wong Sin Kiong of the National University of Singa-
pore has documented, the boycott took off only after American im-
migration officers began humiliating educated Chinese as well as
labourers. America, in effect, provoked a test of national dignity
involving many social classes. Newfangled technology also
helped. The telegraph, the WeChat of its day, allowed far-flung Chi-
nese to share tales of outrage and to organise.
One more parallel is important. Patriotic pride back in 1905 was
mingled with shame, and soul-searching questions about why the
Chinese were too dazzled by foreign goods to resist them for very
long. Jump to 2019 and not much has changed. A popular comment
on Stylist Zoe’s poll laments that Chinese fashion-lovers are too
quick to forgive brands that insult the country.
A big difference is that the boycott in 1905 had a moral argu-
ment at its core, and hurt Chinese merchants as much as American
ones. Today’s campaigns often turn on trivialities and are painless
or even profitable for their promoters. Propagandists have done
their work well. They have made indignation an industry. 7
Chaguan When patriotism is in fashion
China’s thin-skinned online nationalists want to be both loved and feared by the West