🚨 Amazing CCP! Call Mao Zedong a "dictator," and the Chinese Communist Party will make you pay for it.
Real Madrid superstar Kylian Mbappé found that out this week.
In a clip from the French show "The Bridge," Mbappé laughed about his favorite meme of himself: his face pasted onto "some guy—I think he's a Chinese dictator." The "guy" was Mao.
(For readers who don't follow football: fans have long joked that Mbappé is the "dictator" of Real Madrid because of his huge influence at the club. The meme was a football joke, not a statement about China.)
Here is what happened next, within about 48 hours:
1⃣CCP state broadcaster CCTV suspended La Liga broadcasts and all content featuring Mbappé, and pulled his ads.
2⃣His Weibo and Xiaohongshu accounts were muted.
3⃣Three Chinese companies, Dongpeng Beverage, dairy giant Mengniu and cheese maker Milkground, dropped him, in near-identical statements about "hurting national sentiment." Dongpeng had made him the face of its sports drink only in April (photo below).
4⃣Mbappé apologized in Chinese, French and English. La Liga apologized (See below). Real Madrid apologized "to the Chinese people."
5⃣And CCTV still wasn't satisfied: "We will listen to his words, but watch his actions even more closely."
6⃣The funny part: 1.4 billion Chinese people were told they had been "insulted" and should be angry, yet most of them had no idea what Mbappé actually said, or why they should be angry. Many got angry anyway, because "insulting China" is reason enough. Popular Chinese-language writer @dayangelcp and YouTuber even made an episode titled "The End of the Universe Is 'Insulting China,'" mocking how the CCP keeps playing the "insulting China" card to stir up nationalist anger and silence public figures overseas.
So let's be clear about who was actually "hurt."
Mao Zedong WAS a dictator. That is not an insult; it is a description. The famine caused by his Great Leap Forward alone killed tens of millions of Chinese people, and that is before counting the Cultural Revolution and his endless political campaigns.
The people whose feelings deserve respect are the families of those victims. The CCP still won't let them mourn in public, let alone speak.
No ordinary Chinese person was harmed by a football joke. What was "hurt" is the Party's need to keep Mao's portrait hanging over Tiananmen Square, because its own legitimacy is built on him.
And this is how the CCP exports its censorship to the West. It doesn't need to arrest a French footballer. It just switches off the TV deal and the sponsorship money, and a global club and a European league line up to say sorry.
Remember the NBA in 2019? John Cena apologizing in Mandarin in 2021? Same playbook, and every apology tells Beijing it works.
Mbappé was right the first time.
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