I Heart China!

The French Government is about to give Carrefour $20,000,000 USD to make it possible for Carrefours to have a big sale on May 1st [a national holiday]. Carrefour itself is budgeting US$5,000,000 for this sale. The purpose is to attract many many Chinese people to Carrefours on May 1st; better still, they hope a few Chinese would be trampled to death and it would make big world news. The French media is eagerly getting ready for the May 1st sale event at Carrefours. They hope to capture the crazy Chinese shoppers' ugly images to broadcast to the world [to show the world that the Chinese people cannot boycott Carrefours like they say they would].

If you are patriotic, please pass this message onto your friends and relatives and do not shop at Carrefours. Don't make Chinese people lose face, lose dignity, lose nationalism for some bargain so the foreigners can laugh at us. Although we don't count much individually, if we unite, we will show the foreign powers what we are.

Those with a conscience will forward this message to 10 people; those patriotic ones will forward this message to 50 people.

That's a loose translation of an email I got from a co-worker here. The Chinese have been boycotting Carrefour for most of the past week, due largely to the Olympic protests that were staged in Paris.

I was also sent this little cartoon. Not especially complicated...two guys are talking, one says he went to Carrefour so the other goes Chuck Norris on him.

Judging from the conversations that I've had with locals, these Olympic protests are being taken pretty personally. These upcoming Games have long been billed as China's coming out party, and the Chinese feel that everyone's just using this chance to dump on them. The national pride has come out in a few different ways, from the boycotts to protests of the French embassy to people simply changing their MSN names to include "I love China" in them. The government's keeping a close eye on all of it.

It'll be interesting to see how big a role the internet will play in all of this. China hasn't had a controversy of this size since the internet really took off; people can now get and pass along much more information away from the government's prying eyes. Take this skirmish with France, for example. The government, through the country's news outlets, really downplayed the protests in Paris; some reports even said that having the torch go out was part of the plan. And yet, people have somehow squirreled out enough information about what really happened to start emails chains and organize a boycott. China will have to work harder, or at least differently, to make sure people don't stray from the company line too much.

Update: Whoops, there were protests here against Japan in April 2005. The government made it illegal to organize protests using cell phones or emails, and even texted people to tell them so (link). Will that be enough this time around? Cell phones and emails have only gotten more popular in the last 3 years...