nan | 楠木

The incidents in Paris during the Olympic torch relay has certainly sparked quite a strong anti-French sentiment in China, leading to calls for boycotts and some public demonstrations.

For example, today’s top post on Newsmth BBS is about a girl’s public demonstration on the issue in front of a Carrefour store in Beijing. If anything, her encounters during her day of demonstrations show a lot about the current sentiment of the public.

And danwei also has a nice summary post on the domestic sentiment backlash (which can arguably be a PR victory for the Chinese government) which features the calls for boycotts, as well as a absolutely hilarious photoshop poster supporting “independent Corsica”. Yes indeed, let’s start sponsoring Corsica independence groups immediately – someone should start collecting donations.

I also received several text messages from friends inviting me to boycott Carrefour, most importantly because Carrefour’s parent group is allegedly funding Dalai. While I don’t see such boycotts amounting to serious issues financially for the retailing giant, it does put them in an embarrassing situation PR-wise.

As a side-note, Carrefour had 24.8 billion RMB sales in China in 2006, according to Chinainfobank, and that’s less than 5% of Carrefour global sales (87.4 billion Euros in ’06), of which majority comes from Europe. Of course, China is definitely one high growth market no retailer can ignore.

I stand by my observation that the Chinese government is not so concerned with the current hysteria of the western media. If anything, the current hysteria only solidifies its rule and the Chinese government would be pressed by the public to be more heavy-handed in crushing any future riots. The only thing it needs to be careful of is to keep nationalism in check – i.e. don’t let such boycotts / demonstrations against western countries get too out of hand as to escalate the situation. At the end of the day, the Olympics is China’s own party, and unless situations get drastically out of control (mass boycotts by western athletes, which is very unlikely – western governments also have strong incentive to keep their anti-China movement in check, I’m sure no one wants to have freezing relations with China while the US heads into recession), China could care less what others say.