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By John Feng
China Editor
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China's Communist Party doesn’t want you to talk about Chairman Mao—not really—but, if you must, speak carefully or you’ll be sorry.
That was the lesson learned this week by the French soccer player Kylian Mbappé and his employers at Real Madrid, the world’s richest club. They apologized for hurting the feelings of the Chinese people amid a fallout that could cost them millions of dollars.
Mbappé’s crime was to unknowingly insult the memory of China’s late revolutionary leader Mao Zedong, whose name he couldn’t even recall. The star athlete, who is known to be demanding of his teammates, said in an old interview that his favorite meme was of his face superimposed onto the body of a "Chinese dictator."
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China’s knee-jerk reaction to the seemingly benign remark was a sign of Mao’s complex legacy in the country, half a century after his death. The groveling apologies by some of the biggest names in sport were more proof of the Chinese market’s hold over the West.
And it was another victory for Beijing over Western free speech.
How Far Does China’s Money Go?
The backlash against Mbappé, who later said his comment had "hurt many people in China," included brand deals canceled by at least three Chinese companies. The country’s state television group suspended broadcasts of Real Madrid matches and those of Spain’s top soccer league, La Liga, too.
An estimate republished by Chinese media on Thursday said at least a third of Mbappé’s $30 million annual commercial income comes from China, and that a permanent loss of the Chinese market could deny him over $100 million in future earnings.
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The stakes are equally high for his club. It earns up to 15 percent of its international merchandising revenue from China, where Mbappé's No. 10 shirt is the club's top-selling item, according to the Spanish newspaper El Mundo.
La Liga will be sweating the most. Nearly a third of its income in the 2024-2025 season—over $1.7 billion—was generated by the sale of media rights, according to its latest financial report. Nearly half of that came from international markets, the biggest of which were China and the United States.
It explains Mbappé’s swift apology within 24 hours, and similar statements of regret from the Spanish league, league president Javier Tebas, and, finally, Real Madrid.
"We take seriously the apology he has made," Chinese government spokesperson Guo Jiakun said on Wednesday, without revealing whether Beijing would eventually endorse a resumption of his lucrative brand deals and the matchday broadcasts.
The same day, the People’s Daily newspaper, the Communist Party’s official mouthpiece, said: "However, once a public figure’s actions cross the line, their value quickly turns into a liability for the brand. No brand wants to be associated with a liability."
Mbappé wasn’t the first celebrity to fall foul of China’s political sensitivities, and he won’t be the last.
Five years ago, former pro wrestler John Cena said sorry to Chinese audiences in Mandarin after he referred to Taiwan as a "country" during a press junket for the movie F9. China claims self-ruled Taiwan as its own, so Cena’s apology protected the film’s financial stakes in China.
In 2019, basketball player James Harden, then of the Houston Rockets, apologized on behalf of his general manager Daryl Morey, who, in a later-deleted social media post, had shown support for the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.
In 2018, the Marriott International hotel company apologized after a questionnaire listed Tibet and Taiwan as separate countries, inflaming its Chinese customers.
All were examples from the last decade of the influence that Chinese money has bought in the West.
China Gets the Streisand Effect
Beijing’s leaders know Mao’s legacy is not black and white. Historians say his policies to rapidly industrialize China in the mid-20th century were responsible for tens of millions of deaths through famine, and the fanaticism of his Cultural Revolution may have killed millions more until his death in 1976.
The Communist Party’s own reflections admit Mao was not without faults; it was especially wary of the cult of personality that followed him. But these aren’t for public comment, particularly at a time when the same phenomenon emerges around China’s current leader, Xi Jinping.
The Party doesn’t permit debate of its official heroes and martyrs because it fears the unpredictable snowball effect that alternative views of history can have on the public consciousness and therefore its legitimacy to rule China.
China would’ve preferred not to address Mbappé’s interview, which was filmed back in April. However, it was left with little choice but to embrace the Streisand effect when the Chinese soccer forum Dongqiudi brought it to the public’s attention with a vague statement that condemned Mbappé’s "inappropriate remarks," which it said it couldn’t translate, hinting at potential legal consequences.
What followed was a natural flood of curiosity that forced Chinese users onto VPN software to track down the player’s comments on Western social media sites, and to effectively whisper the sensitive words to each other via direct message.
Censorship and the fear of censorship are so widespread within China’s Great Firewall that state news outlets have spent days reporting Mbappé’s offense without describing what he actually did. Guangming Daily, another Party newspaper, said only that he had "actively referenced a malicious meme that seriously hurt the feelings of the Chinese people."
The result on China’s largest social media app, Weibo, was that many users were unaware of what Mbappé had said, and by briefly peering beyond the Chinese internet, inadvertently learned of a debate about whether Mao’s past actions qualified him as a dictator.
Under Mbappé’s latest Weibo post celebrating his role in Real Madrid's victory over main rival Barcelona on Sunday, a top comment read: "Please apologize solemnly to the Chinese people and don’t come back ever again."
"What did he say?" multiple comments asked in the replies. One user responded: "You don’t even know what he said. How do you know he hurt your feelings?"
Whichever Way You Look at It, China Wins
Some in China think the nation’s leaders missed an opportunity to reshape Mao’s image in the West, or "to broaden the horizons of ordinary people overseas," as one user put it.
But China’s ruling logic doesn’t work that way. Given the option to have outsiders say nice things about Mao, it would rather that no one said anything about him at all.
A search on Weibo for the term "dictator" returned no results related to Mbappé’s offending interview, while typing his name showed all the criticisms by China’s top propaganda outlets. It means commentators in the West can debate all they like about Mao, as long as Beijing gets to decide how he’s defined within its walls.
China may come off as insecure, fragile even, but it has tamed another mega brand in the West and is once again the uncontested winner.
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