D&G is still out of grace of China’s consumers – Shaun Rein

 

Shaun Rein

Dolce & Gabbana (D&G) got three years into hot water over racist ads and remarks with China’s consumers, and the row did not subside, says business analyst Shaun Rein. “It’s probably the only brand that I’ve seen the Chinese stay angry at for so long,” he told CNN.

CNN:

The brand has not signed a major mainland Chinese name since the incident. For a 2020 Chinese Valentines Day campaign, it used a combination of White and CGI models, dubbed “virtual idols.” And although hiring Chinese celebrity ambassadors and influencers could represent a way to regain trust in the country, it would be “career suicide,” according to Shaun Rein, founder and managing director of China Market Research Group.

According to Rein, it is the alleged Instagram messages, rather than the ad campaign itself, that continue to affect the label’s reputation in China. “It’s probably the only brand that I’ve seen the Chinese stay angry at for so long,” he told CNN.

The label’s recent moves to sue Diet Prada for defamation have only continued to “keep the story alive,” added Rein, who likened it to the “Streisand effect,” whereby attempts to cover something up only draws more attention to it. The lawsuit, which D&G declined to comment on, has created the impression that Gabbana “was mad that his private correspondence got out,” Rein said, adding that Chinese consumers felt the messages were “the true feelings, potentially, of the founder denigrating the Chinese people” — despite the fact that Gabbana and co-founder Domenico Dolce filmed an apology video shortly after the 2018 incident.

Not that the video won them any goodwill at the time. “(It was) like he was trying to save money and his brand, but it wasn’t coming from the heart,” Rein said. “Because again, if you say something publicly but then allegedly say ‘Chinese are s**t’ in private, then who’s going to believe you?”…

The online furor has had real-world ramifications for D&G. In 2018, the brand had 58 boutiques in China, according to NPR. Three years on, its website lists just 47, with shops recently closing in Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu, according to industry publication Business of Fashion.

The label remains entirely frozen out of major Chinese e-retailers Tmall and JD.com, both of which pulled the brand from its virtual shelves soon after the 2018 incident. According to Rein, it is unlikely that the platforms will stock the brand anytime soon, as they are “petrified by these nationalistic consumers.”

“If you can’t sell on Tmall, you can’t do business in China,” he said, adding: “If I were Dolce and Gabbana, I would take two or three years off from investing in China.”

More at CNN.

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Dealing with racism in China – Zhang Lijia

 

Zhang Lijia

As the Black Lives Matter movement took over some of the headlines, China typically dismissed racism as a Western problem. Author Zhang Lijia begs to differ, in The Wire. “The Chinese government claims to have “zero tolerance” for racism, but there have been no reports that anyone has been punished for the actions against the Africans in Guangzhou or elsewhere,” she adds.

Zhang Lijia:

Women who married  Black men were often insulted publicly for 下嫁 – marrying beneath them – whilst women with white husbands were sometimes accused of being “gold diggers”.

It dawned on me that as they grappled with modernisation, many Chinese were placing themselves in the middle of a racial hierarchy: above the black and below the white.

The outbreak of racial tension in Guangzhou last April did trigger some reflection. One unidentified African resident of the city – a man – made a video confessing his love for China and uploaded it on social media. In fluent Chinese he said he had been living in China for nine years, regarded himself as Chinese and considered China his mother. Sadly, he was rewarded with a deluge of taunts and jeers.

“Don’t be a hypocrite!” one Chinese netizen replied. “You love China only because China is richer than your country.” Another slung an insult. “You aren’t a Chinese at all. Don’t outstay your welcome. You lot are cockroaches and rats!”

China’s rising position in the world has led to the rise of nationalism, which is all apparent in those messages. With this lack of public awareness, racist discourse has become an integral part of Chinese nationalism.

In a book about race and medicine in China, sinologist Frank Dikötter pointed out that in China darker races were “discursively represented as hereditarily inadequate and waiting to go into extinction.”

As it has rippled across the globe, the BLM movement has forced civil society in several Asian countries to confront their own racial and ethnical prejudices. The result has been a spate of protests and public debates on issues such as the discrimination against Papuans in Indonesia, the privilege of the Chinese in Singapore and the death of Indians in custody in Malaysia.

Let’s face it: racism exists in every society. Professor Barry Sautman, a professor in the Division of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology wrote a paper, ‘Anti-Black Racism in Post Mao China,’ in which he called for an enforced legal deterrent. “Without it, no place in the world can diminish racial discrimination,” he said to me in an interview.

As a Chinese citizen I can only hope that the government will take the opportunity created by the rise of the BLM movement to deal frontally with racism in China, allow its people to discuss and show their support for it and encourage public debate, as Japan is doing.

The Chinese government claims to have “zero tolerance” for racism, but there have been no reports that anyone has been punished for the actions against the Africans in Guangzhou or elsewhere.

More in the Wire.

Zhang Lijia is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your (online) meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.

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How US-China relations are heading for disaster - Kaiser Kuo

Kaiser Kuo

China veteran Kaiser Kuo discusses the future of relations between China and the US, as disaster is luring, while cooperation is needed more than ever considering the problems of the coronavirus and climate change. On racism in the US, at the Oxford Political Review.

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The yellow peril: where is it coming from? - Zhang Lijia

Zhang Lijia

The ongoing coronavirus crisis has triggered off much racist behavior outside China and the qualification "Yellow Peril" raised its ugly head again. Journalist Zhang Lijia, author of Lotus, a novel, on prostitution in China, dives into the history of Western racism towards China and the Chinese for the South China Morning Post.

Zhang Lijia:

As China was the sick man of Asia, so Chinese were regarded as the “Yellow Peril”. At the tail end of the 19th century, German emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II reportedly came up with the term after he saw, in his dream, Buddha riding a dragon, threatening to invade Europe. 

Even if he did not coin the term, Wilhelm popularised the psycho-cultural perception of the so-called civilised world – that is, the Anglo-Saxon empires – in danger of being overrun by the yellow-skinned East Asians (the Chinese and Japanese). 

He then encouraged European powers to conquer and colonise China. In 1898, Germany coerced China into leasing it 553 square kilometres in its northeast, including Qingdao, for 99 years. That was another event of national humiliation. 

Even before the aggressive German emperor, however, white supremacists in the US had embraced the “Asian menace” theory, demanding that the government bar immigration of “filthy yellow hordes” of Chinese. 

The white labour unions lobbied to keep out Chinese, claiming that some Chinese malaises were more virulent than white ones. This led to America’s 1882 China Exclusion Act, an immigration law that prevented Chinese labour from entering the US. It was revoked in 1943 but old prejudices persist. 

One editorial from 1954, for example, in the influential New York Tribune newspaper, described the Chinese thus: “They are uncivilised, unclean, filthy beyond all conception, without any of the higher domestic or social relations; lustful and sensual in their dispositions; every female is a prostitute, and of the basest order.” 

In a 2014 review of the book Perceptions of the East – Yellow Peril: An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear, sinologist Leung Wing-fai explains that: “The phrase yellow peril (sometimes yellow terror or yellow spectre) … blends Western anxieties about sex, racist fears of the alien other, and the Spenglerian belief that the West will become outnumbered and enslaved by the East.” 

Some experts have noticed that only certain disease outbreaks have been racialised. Those that originated from China, such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) and the novel coronavirus, as well as Ebola from Africa, led to a racial backlash. However, this did not happen with the swine flu pandemic that originated in North America or “mad cow disease” from Britain. 

When millions of Chinese are suffering, racist headlines and comments are doubly insensitive and inappropriate. It only perpetuates the stereotype that Asians are disease-ridden. Fear and racism feed on each other, and both hinder our fight against the virus.

More at the South China Morning Post.

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Chinese racism in Africa - Howard French

+Howard French 

One of the major stories told in Howard French´s latest book China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa is that of the Chinese attitude towards Africans. Howard French gives his take at NPR. 

NPR:

MARTIN: It was interesting to me how much racism you personally encountered over the course of your travels. I mean, just the kind of day-to-day, casual reminders of distance that is certainly not polite in this country anymore. I'm thinking about when you went to this hotel in Liberia. And then you went to this room to drop off your things and wash up, and there was no towel there. And then when you told your host this, he summoned a young Chinese man who worked for him and told him to fetch me one. He says, we don't usually give them out because most Chinese bring their own. They wouldn't want to use one that a black person might have used. I mean, put this in some context for me. I mean, do you think that this is, kind of, growing pains, and that at some point will people have moved beyond that? What's your sense?

FRENCH: Everywhere I went, the local Chinese person referred to the people, in whose midst they had come to settle, as black people. You know, they would say, the blacks, the blacks, the blacks, the blacks. They wouldn't say the Ghanaians, or the Tanzanians, or the Zambians, or the this or the that. It was just, the blacks. And this refusal, or reluctance, to allow any kind of finer identity - to render them totally anonymous as just simply black, as if that was the only pertinent detail about them, was very telling for me. That whether or not this is a passing phase, I can't really say. But for the time being, the Africans are just, essentially, serving as a backdrop for Chinese processes - somebody that will be useful for them - or a place that will be useful for them for the time being along the way, as they proceed up the ladder of hierarchies, if you will, of civilizations of nations.

More at NPR. 

Howard French is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers´ request form.

Howard French has been interviewed on a wide range of subjects, covered by his book. Click here for an updated overview of his latest interviews.  

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China´s complicated Africa relationship - Howard French

+Howard French 

When it comes to Chinese abroad, avoiding cliches is tough. Author Howard French of China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa. According to this review in the Huffington Post, he does a good job.

The Huffington Post:

Meanwhile, French also captures well the frustrations many Africans hold against this surge of Chinese attention, one aspect of which is the tendency for Chinese to import their own workers and subsequently underinvest Racism is also a source of contention, particularly with respect to Chinese opinions of Africans' work ethic. "Black people are not good at getting things done. Their customs were formed back when there was no telephone and no highway," is one of the less offensive quotes French captures. 

Yet, as French writes in retort, "I felt like reminding [his host] that perhaps forty million Chinese people had died of starvation a half century earlier ... It was the largest famine in history. A snapshot taken then would have given a very different picture of the supposedly essential character of Chinese people, and it would have entirely missed the point. Governments matter. Markets matter. History matters. International circumstances matter." 

Perhaps even more important than this superficial racism is the combination of ignorance toward African history and arrogance that the West has long been guilty of alone. Both make China's future standing on the continent vulnerable. Yet, instead of attempting to engage the broader population or insist that government relations be conducted at an institutional level, China prefers to deal directly with individual African leaders. The result is, quite ironically, a subversion of African governance.

The full review in the Huffington Post.

Howard French is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers´ request form.

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British colonialism, racism and dog meat - Zhang Lijia

Zhang Lijia

Celebrity author Zhang Lijia is annoyed by the British colonial attitude towards China, as urban myths on dog meat, donkey penises and other 'weird' food get the major focus the British, ignoring the country's great cuisine, she writes in The Guardian.

The Guardian:

China has a fabulous and sophisticated cuisine, but westerners always focus on the tiny percentage of what we eat that is weird. And the very good reasons that the weird stuff made it into Chinese kitchens is never mentioned: Chinese cuisine is very much a famine cuisine; historically, Chinese people have had to make use every bit of available resources. 

A few years ago, when the comedian Paul Merton came to China to make a travel documentary, I was invited to take part... 

Merton was genuinely interested in learning more about China, but the director whisked us away to the restaurant where all sorts of animal's male organs were served. Eating animal's penis is thought by some to improve a man's performance in bed. But this is not something that runs deep in Chinese culture – there are only two penis restaurants in China, and both belong to the same owner. The crew spent hours tirelessly filming us eating stir-fried bull's penis, snake's penis in a soup and a large boiled donkey's penis. Poor Merton struggled and even threw up at one point. 

In the final film, the donkey's penis dominates the scene. Our serious discussion was edited out.

More in The Guardian.

Zhang Lijia is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch.

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