Chiu-Ti Jansen

Opinion | China damages its brand when it co-opts celebrities into its One-China, pro-police propaganda drive

Entertainers such as Liu Yifei and Jackie Chan have sparked backlashes outside China after taking positions on the Hong Kong protests. While such displays play well to Chinese nationalists, they might actually hurt China’s image overseas

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Why you can trust SCMP

Chiu-Ti Jansen

Published: 3:00am, 22 Aug 2019Updated: 3:19am, 22 Aug 2019

In the midst of heightened tension over the unrest in Hong Kong, many of the top 50 topics trending on China’s Weibo platform last week pertained to international brands from Versace and Givenchy to Coach and Swarovski apologising for daring to mislabel Hong Kong or Taiwan as countries on their products or websites.

Supermodel Liu Wen, actress Yang Mi and pop idol Jackson Yee were among the celebrities who publicly severed their endorsement contracts with the brands and declared their allegiance to the one-China policy.

Yet, there seemed to be double standards when it came to Huawei, the technology giant that has become a nationalist symbol in the trade war with the United States. The company emerged unscathed even though it was found to have labelled Taipei as part of Taiwan, not China, on its phones for the Taiwan market. Some Weibo users also complained that their posts regarding this revelation were deleted by the site’s administrator.

The timing of all these revelations was intriguing. Regardless of whether the nationalist fever was fanned to reshape the narrative around Hong Kong as a secessionist conspiracy and therefore prepare the domestic audience for a possible military crackdown, the political message was unmistakable: there is zero tolerance for political incorrectness.

Any person of influence who publicly takes a position on China’s territorial integrity and sovereignty should be respected, if their views are based on real political conviction. But some may question the wisdom of abruptly terminating contracts in the grip of nationalism.

After all, most web designers for brands are unlikely to have deliberately courted controversy by placing a territory in the wrong category. Also, it might not help that the International Organisation for Standardisation includes different two-letter Web domain names for different subdivisions of countries, for example.