China: Carrefour under boycott threat

Carrefour has been rolled into a campaign mixed up with both boycott and anti-boycott.

Recently, a widely circulated message writes

我们希望您至少在5月1日这一天抵制家乐福,让5月1日家乐福空荡荡的卖场向西方传达一个信息:中国 不可辱!中国人民不可欺!
抵制家乐福的活动将在全国各地展开,期待您的参与!谢谢您。

We hope you are able to boycott Carrefour at least on 1 May, to deliver, by the empty Carrefour that day, one message to the western world: Chinese shouldn’t be humiliated! Chinese people shouldn’t be insulted!
The boycott against Carrefour is going to spreading all over the country, and we anticipate your presence! Thank you.

boycott logo
The logo of boycott

Carrefour, the French retail giant, is the newest target on the list of what cyber-nationalists in China hate and aim at. Cell phone text messages calling on boycotts are popping up, over 5000 net cafes in China, as Daqi.com summed up, have been rife with posts against Carrefour, and quite a few radical netizens have already made the slogans into practice.

The boycott is supposed to be caused by the recent grief and violence the Olympic torch relay suffered from in France and the saying that a big shareholder of Carrefour, LVMH group, has donated money to the Dalai Lama.

The original text of the widely circulated appeal also explains the cause of the campaign,

刚刚结束的法国PARIS站OLYMPIC圣火传递,并不象大多数国人所知道的那样平静。在中国人把象征友谊与和平的OLYMPIC圣火传进法国时,我们看到法国人和 法国go-vern-ment都做了什么:
1.圣火传递前,法国当地电视台号召市民上街抗议示威,说:“不要让中国的旗子飘的到处都是”。
2.圣火传递中,火炬在Z D势力及其支持者的暴力阻挠下,被迫四次熄灭;
3.负责安保的法国pol.ice任由Z D分子在其眼皮底下抢夺火炬,殴打中国残疾火炬手,却袖手旁观;
4.火炬所到之处,法国人成群结队地举着Z D分子的旗子,叫嚣“XZ独立”、“中国羞耻”等口号,向中国示威;
5.成群的法国青年甚至抢夺中国留学生手中的五星红旗,当众撕碎,并殴打中国留学生;
6.法国巴黎市go-vern-ment在圣火经过市政厅时,悬挂出支持XZ独立的横幅和标语,全体市议员胸前佩带支持XZ独立的标章,使得原定于在市政厅前举行的庆祝仪式不得不取消;
7.法国的主流媒体在圣火传递结束后,以这样的标题进行了回顾:“火炬在巴黎惨败”法国《费加罗报》,“给中国一记耳光”法国《解放报》。

The Olympic torch relay that just ended in Paris is not as peaceful as most of Chinese know about. Let’s see what French and its government have done when Chinese carried the torch, a symbol of peace and friendship into their territory.
1. Before the relay, a French TV station called on people to protest on street for the reason that they “don’t want Chinese flags flaunting all over”.
2. The torch was forced to extinguish for 4 times under the violent disruptions of Tibet separatists.
3. The French police in charge of security simply stood by to see the separatists snatching the torch, and striking the disabled torch carrier.
4. At where the torch went by, hordes of French waved the flag of separatists, clamoring “Free Tibet’, “Shame on China” to protest against China.
5. Groups of young men even scrambled the Chinese students’ Five-star flags and tore them up, two sides in conflict.
6. When the sacred fire passed by the City Hall of Paris, the banners and slogans of pro-Tibet independence were hung out and all the alderman put on the pro-separatism badges, a behavior that made the planned ceremony there cancelled.
7. The major media in France reviewed the torch relay with such headlines— Fiasco in Paris(Figaro) and A Slap on China

And it’s not unusual to see such comments tightly following up the petition.

完全抵制家乐福。
Completely boycott Carrefour.
坚决抵制
Resolutely boycott!

Furthermore, QQ groups all over China were set up to recruit boycott activists. A list shows that places including Chongqing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, more than 20 areas totally, have joined this cyber campaign, during which netizens can communicate by the IM tool to make the whole protest more organizational.

Kunming protest

In fact at Kunming, a city in southern China, netizens have extended their slogans to the reality

by protesting in front of the local Carrefour. The banner reads:
支持奥运,反对藏独,抵制法货,抵制家乐福

Support Olympic, oppose Tibet-independence; boycott French products and Carrefour!

The following pictures show the protest in the city of Wuhan. Notice that the banner has exactly the same word as that in Kunming.

wuhan

wuhan2

In Beijing, a girl held up a self-made sign to show her anger with the brutal treat Jin Jing, the disabled torch carrier received in France.

Beijing girl1

Beijing firl2
The girl in Beijing protested alone outside Carrefour. She was then persuaded away by a police.

A netizen commented:

顶礼!

Salute to her!

A-dish-of-cuisine said:

这帖子不顶我就不是中国人
mm,你是我们中国人的榜样!
比那些漠然无视的人狠狠一巴掌!

I were not a Chinese if I didn’t bump up this post
Girl, you are the Chinese idol!
A tough slap over those indifferent people.
Anti-boycott is also on fire

This time the rivaling voice doesn’t fade as years ago when the appeal of boycotting Japan products was at climax. Even on Tianya.com, a well-known marketplace of bold clamors and patriotism, the petitions of anti-boycott don’t shy away.

In Tianya, netizen Lepel said in his post “you are so unwise to boycott Carrefour, or, you think us too unwise”,

看到很多人在发起和组织抵制法国零售业巨头家乐福的活动,感觉实在可笑,同时也深为国人的愚昧而痛心。就象之前的抵制日货、抵制美货,或更久远的抵制洋货 运动一样愚昧。难道,非要把中国孤立于这个世界才好?难道,非要再搞一次“闭关锁国”才罢?想象当初的反日活动,作为一个老百姓,我们得到了什么好处?而 政府在双方关系缓和后,却又开始“镇压”有些失控的反日活动。……..这 样的教训还不够,现在又要反法,好了,你抵制了一个家乐福,便宜的只是其他超市,老百姓得到的只是要多跑一些路、多花一些钱去买日用品,还会得到什么?等 有朝一日,法国换了总统或对华政策,到时候又回到“中法友谊万古长存”的路子上来是早晚的事,到了那时候在看看今天大家的举动难道不觉得可笑吗?

I feel it so ridiculous when hearing that so many people are organizing a boycott against Carrefour. I bear great sorrow for their blindness, which is as much stupid as the boycotts against Japanese, American and all western products long time ago. Do you have to isolate China from the world again? Reviewing the anti-Japan activity years ago, I wonder what we commons have really got the campaign. When the tension between the governments came to ease, the anti-Japan action that slightly crossed the line got a crackdown….and we have not yet learnt a lesson from that, and now we are going to have anti-France.
Fine, with the boycott, you would simply favor advantage to all other supermarkets and let people go further and spend more for daily shopping. Anything else?
Someday in the future when a new French president comes into power or the policy gets changed, everything will just go back to “Long live China-France friendship”, sooner or later. At that time, won’t it be laughable to look back at what we are doing now?

在爽与不爽中徘徊 analyzed that it will be the Chinese people that really suffer from the boycott, if it comes true.

抵制家乐福?拜托 实际上你抵制的是那些中国的生产厂家 家乐福的中国员工 还有什么 还有我们自己国家 因为家乐福在对中国政府上税!!!你能抵制到巴黎市长么?扯淡吧

Boycott Carrefour? Come on! You are actually boycotting the Chinese manufactures, Chinese workmen there and the country of our own, because Carrefour pays tax to our government!!! Are you able to boycott Paris mayor? BS.

HAINAN-COCONUT-WIND(海南椰风)ridicules,

我干嘛要抵制,我朝都没有号召,没准过段日子又在大谈中法友好呢!以前和越南又是打战又是谴责的,现在不还是亲切友好的会谈,不还是中越人民友谊嘛!死的那些战士,谁他妈管他们!cao!

Why should I boycott? Our dynasty (allusion to the ruling party-translator) has not yet called on, and perhaps soon they will talk greatly on the China-France friendship.
In history, it used to fight hard with Vietnam, but what about now? Friendly conversation and fellowship between us two peoples! Who care about those soldiers died there? F…

柳州刺史 recalled what he was doing ten years ago,

10年前,中国大使馆被霉菌炸了,我比现在的粪粪还粪粪,回想一下,真想抽自己嘴巴

Ten years ago when the Chinese embassy was bombed by U.S army I was even more indignant that the “patriotic young men” today. Thinking over that I really wish to slap myself.

东边日出西边女 might be facing an embarrassment,

 我们这个中小城市政府目前正在加大力度引进家乐福.各的小官员忙得不亦乐乎.
我该怎么办,抵制?和我D政府不是一条心了.

Our city is taking pain to introduce the Carrefour in, every official extremely busy on that plan. What should I do? Boycott? Then I will be clashing with our party and country.

城南笑笑 grumbled

反日反法发德反韩反台反意反澳反越反英反美•••反全世界••反整个宇宙。就是不反独裁和腐败。悲哀的人

Anti-Japan anti-France anti-German anti-Korea anti-Taiwan anti-Italy anti-Australia anti-Vietnam anti-Britain anti-U.S…anti-world…anti-universe.
But NO anti-autarchy and corruption. So tragic men.

And Adaste concluded,

这就叫政府挖坑,热血青年栽树

This is called “the government digs holes, and zealous youngsters plant trees”.

Finally, an analogy might reveal how a lot of people view this patriotic action.
Magicsilence said,

粪青乃我党的安全套,高潮之后即弃之

The patriotic youngsters are the condom of the party— discarded right after orgasm.

The points of the two camps diverge sharply. Rumors have been heard that Carrefour is going to make considerable discounts on 1 May to counteract the planned boycott. And it has announced that it will always be the friend of Chinese. But even not so, the chances of a successful boycott campaign is doubted, as the predominant public opinion years ago for a boycott over Japan didn’t make a good shot, while today the each side is equally strong.

(Note: Pictures copied from Mop.com. Quoted opinions without given links are comments on threads in Tianya.cn that discuss the boycott. Thanks to the net forums.)

78 comments

  • Le

    Nano, with people like you and me backing China, she will NOT split. Cheers

  • Le

    At first, I do NOT support boycott of Carrefour, but now, hey the youngsters can go at it if it makes them feel proud. My best wishes to China, Chinese in mainland and abroad.

    Support Olympic, oppose Tibet-independence; boycott French products and Carrefour!

  • maiki

    Hey, another funny thread on this side with funny chinese people. May the torch with you guys. Enjoy life instead of hacking into your computers. You wont get any sympathy by that from other countries. But your enough in your country so you can beat out us by numbers, especially if you could get more than one child ;-)

  • tingting

    U.S. Academic Defends China, Citing Progress

    April 15, 2008; Page A9
    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120819955370513509.html
    BEIJING — Susan Brownell has qualifications that few can match as an authority on sports in China.

    An academic and Virginia native, Ms. Brownell speaks and reads Chinese. She has lived in China for years and knows all the top Chinese sports officials. To top it off, she was a nationally ranked U.S. track-and-field athlete who also competed on Chinese teams.

    SPORTING INTEREST

    • Background: Susan Brownell, a University of Missouri, St. Louis, anthropologist, is an expert on Chinese sports. She speaks Chinese and was once a track-and-field athlete.
    • Her View: She believes China’s sports system isn’t an evil medal machine as sometimes portrayed, and she says Beijing is a worthy Olympics host.But Ms. Brownell has a conclusion that many in the West might find surprising: that China’s sports system isn’t the evil medal machine portrayed in the popular press. She also thinks China will not only put on a good Olympics but is a worthy host in the best tradition of the Olympics — even with the turmoil in the West over Tibet.

    “The moment is right for China to hold the games,” says Ms. Brownell, who thinks the uproar can help push a rethink in China about its policy toward Tibet and other minorities. “How it responds, we’ll see.”

    Susan Brownell
    Ms. Brownell has laid out her views in her second book on China’s sports system, “Beijing’s Games: What the Olympics Mean to China,” which was published in February. She says she expects the book to be widely criticized.

    In fact, she says even her mother had trouble with the book.

    Last summer, when she was revising the book, she went home to visit her mother and asked her to review it. While Ms. Brownell sat on an upstairs balcony reading proofs, she began to hear her mother on the patio below.

    “She’d yell upstairs her disapproval,” Ms. Brownell says. “It was the idea that China is an evil government that oppresses its people — human rights, religious freedom and so on.”

    Ms. Brownell doesn’t dispute that China has problems, but she says many Western criticisms are hypocritical or ignore the huge progress China has made in many areas. More than that, she sees the two sides’ failure to understand each other as a tragedy.

    “When you see the enthusiasm, the idealism and the faith in a better future and then when you look at the perception abroad — that it’s propping up a regime, air pollution, child-athlete factories — there is a disjuncture,” Ms. Brownell says.

    Ms. Brownell, a 47-year-old anthropologist at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, has also recently translated into English the biography of China’s only member of the International Olympic Committee. And she has gone further, sometimes advising Chinese officials on how to be more effective in communicating with the West.

    In the small world of academics who write on sports in China, Ms. Brownell’s positions are by far the most optimistic.

    “Susan wants to counteract prejudices against the PRC and she seems, sometimes, to become an apologist for the regime,” wrote Allen Guttmann, a professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts who has written on sports history, in an email answer to a query. “Mostly, however, I think she’s about as objective as is possible. I don’t think, in anthropological jargon, that she’s ‘gone native.'”

    Susan Brownell is in Beijing on a Fulbright grant, researching a book on the Games.
    Ms. Brownell says some of her sympathy for China comes from her personal athletic and educational background. She grew up on a farm near the Appalachian Mountains in Lexington, Va. That was before the Title IX federal act required schools to give girls equal access to sports. She ran on the boys track team in high school and went to University of Virginia on a full athletic scholarship. She was immediately attracted to anthropology because she felt it tried to understand other cultures rather than immediately judge them.

    In sports, her disciplines were the pentathlon and heptathlon. She competed in the 1980 and 1984 Olympic trials but didn’t make the team. She went to China the next year as a graduate student in anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. While in China, she competed for a team made up of Beijing athletes in the 1986 National College Games. Her stunning success — she won a gold in the heptathlon and two silvers — earned her the sobriquet of “The American Girl Who Won Glory for Beijing.”

    She was on her way to qualifying for the 1988 U.S. Olympic trials, which would have meant an impressive three straight trials. But she realized that it wasn’t her profession anymore and stayed on in China. “I had to say I am an anthropologist, not an athlete,” she said.

    In 1995, she came out with a book on the growing importance of sport in China, which also recounted her adventures in Chinese athletics. She said participating in China made her realize that Chinese athletes are hardly different from other countries’.

    “I got involved in figure skating in the U.S. and believe me, the children there are up at all hours practicing, and the parents are pushing them, too,” she says. “When I see things like ‘assembly line of pain’ in the U.S. media to describe Chinese sports schools, I think it’s ridiculous.”

    Susan Brownell, far left, accepting the sixth-place award for Beijing University in the 1986 Beijing City College Meet.
    One of the main problems, she says, is that the people who write about Chinese sports know very little about China. “One of the problems really is sports journalism,” she says. “Most sports journalists are commentators and don’t really investigate.”

    Western reporters, she says, also assume that much is secret in China and use that as an excuse to make all sorts of claims or generalizations. She was recently asked by a reporter for a national U.S. magazine to use her contacts to get him a copy of China’s policy on athletes’ commercial endorsements. Half an hour later, Ms. Brownell emailed the reporter a copy — it had been on the sport authority’s Internet site. “People assume it’s all secret in China but that’s only because they can’t read Chinese,” she says.

    Likewise, she views skeptically generalizations about Chinese not having a sports history — a critique often made to debase China’s gold-medal haul. The argument is that China participates in the Olympics only to win national glory and not out of any legitimate sporting tradition. But Ms. Brownell says that most of what we know about the Olympics is based on more than a century of intense archaeological work in Greece. That sort of work has never been done in China, she says.

    A cursory glance at the written record, however, shows that some sports, such as horse racing and wrestling, played key roles in some of the dynasties that ruled China. “China has been written out of sports history,” she says.

    This accounts for the lack of non-Western sports in the Olympics — in fact, the only explicitly non-Western sports are judo from Japan (introduced at the 1964 Tokyo games) and tae kwan do from Korea (introduced at the 1988 Seoul games). China tried to get its own form of martial arts, wushu, introduced this year, but the request was turned down.

    Although she now has tenure at the university, her efforts to understand — and even help — China haven’t always been to her professional advantage. She spent four years translating the biography of IOC member He Zhenliang for a government-run press in China. She did it because she “felt a sense of mission” to explain China’s IOC involvement from its point of view. She has also screened government Olympic ads aimed at foreigners.

    “Chinese do have trouble communicating with Westerners,” she says. “They are more reserved and formal and careful.”

    Ms. Brownell is in Beijing for the year on a Fulbright grant. She is researching a book on how the Games played out and putting down her thoughts occasionally on a blog (http://thechinabeat.blogspot.com/). The U.S. Embassy in Beijing has asked her to write a biweekly blog.

    “I view my work as a cultural bridge. I assume that how I write is not how Chinese people see it, and they wouldn’t agree with everything, but I do my best to represent their views so they can be understood by English speakers

  • good

    Boycott all French goods.

    These cheese eater, filthy smelly cowardy pigs must be punished.

    French pigs, get out of China.

  • ur chinese friend

    Are there any solid evidence that Carrefour is supporting the Free-Tibet movement? As much I dislike the French (who likes them anyway?), just because it’s a French company doesn’t mean it it wants to split China. The key to sustaining a big businesses is risk management. Unlike Western politicans, big businesses do not need to please any Tibetophiles or Sinophobes to become popular. Supporting Tibet carries a big business risk with no return at all. If Carrefour execs are stupid enough to be engaged in this type of controversial politics, then you don’t even need to boycott it in order to punish these execs. It’s shareholders will force out the management in no time.

  • Nano

    1) It was reported that “Wang Guangyi and Lu Hao, two of the biggest names in China’s roaring contemporary art scene, said they would not take part in a June exhibition at a Paris gallery because of French attitudes toward the Olympics.”

    That’s a good move, guys.

    2)And it was also just been reported that “China is the main source of dangerous goods in Europe, according to a safety report by the European Commission.”

    Look’s like the EU’s anti-China campaign hasn’t let up yet.

  • Brad

    ” Look’s like the EU’s anti-China campaign hasn’t let up yet. ”

    Everything seems to have an ‘Anti-Chinese’ slant to it doesn’t it?

    You really think western governments just sit around and talk about how they can demonize those pesky Chinese? – don’t flatter yourself.

  • I would like Imagine The Olympics in U.S.A, since she is Occupying Iraq, and we all knew about Abo-Ghraib, I wonder If such a media will call for not attending the Olympics, or at least distort the picture of U.S.A.

    Tibet problem should be treated away from Olympics.
    Politics and Sport should not be mixed.

  • Nano

    @Brad,

    Of course, Western governments are not idly sitting around chatting about demonization of those pecky Chinese. They have many better things to do – for example, how best to establish hegemony over Iraq and Afghanistan. They already got Kosovo in their bag and the next target is Iran. As for the demonizing of the Chinese, they left it to their Western media. The results of their propanganda campaigns have been largely successful as indicated by their recent polls:

    “A new poll shows that Europeans now see China — not the US — as the biggest threat to global security.

    The transformation of China’s image from a land of economic opportunities to one of global threat is seen largely as a result of the Western media coverage of the Asian economic power (China).

    Leonard (from the European Council on Foreign Relations) pointed out that Europeans only glean their information about China from the news coverage, which has recently been unfavorable, whereas their view of the US is also based on their exposure to American popular culture.”

    You wrote ‘Everything seems to have an ‘Anti-Chinese’ slant to it doesn’t it?’ No, not everything, but now those coming out from the EU and USA concerning China, mostly do.

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