Italian luxury jeweler Bulgari apologized to China on Tuesday for listing Taiwan as an independent country in a drop-down menu on its website.
Bulgari declared its firm respect for “China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” explained the Taiwan listing as one of several “mismarks in the store locations due to management negligence,” and “sincerely apologized.”
As with several previous cases of foreign companies forced to obey China’s speech codes, the website menu became a subject of outrage on China’s heavily controlled social media platform, Weibo, and Bulgari apologized after a few days of angry posts and boycott threats.
The social media outrage was clearly orchestrated. Bulgari’s website was spotlighted in a Weibo post by the state-run China News Service. The news service proclaimed its anger that Bulgari’s website had options for “China Hong Kong” and “China Macau” but referred to Taiwan as simply “Taiwan.”
The Chinese Communist Party’s media outlet proceeded to run a “poll” and found over 70,000 social media users had joined in its outrage against Bulgari.
The jeweler quickly became a trending topic on Weibo, as did the Chinese celebrities hired to endorse its products. After Bulgari wrote a Weibo post apologizing for the website menu, the state newspaper China Daily immediately demanded the company apologize on every social media platform, humbling itself before non-Chinese users as well.
“Bulgari made a mistake on its overseas official website but only issued an apology on its mainland China account. Such an apology may hardly convince Chinese consumers,” China Daily sniffed.
Excitable Weibo users chimed in with comments, such as, “Did you post it on the overseas Internet? Don’t be a two-faced person who only wants Chinese people to see!”
“It’s already become a top search item, can Bulgari offer a response and explain whether this was an inadvertent move or a deliberate move?” said another user.
A Weibo thread asking if Bulgari’s apology was accepted racked up over 12 million views. Yet another Chinese state media outlet, the Global Times, named several Chinese actresses and models who work as “brand ambassadors” for Bulgari and said, “Some netizens have urged the Chinese celebrities to sever ties with the Italian brand in protest.”
The Global Times boasted:
Taiwan is an inalienable part of China’s territory and cannot be listed as a country. China regards the Taiwan question at the very core of China’s core interests. Many foreign brands have made similar mistakes and, after they drew fierce backlash from the Chinese public, apologized and adjusted their listings.
One of the earliest examples of China using economic leverage and orchestrating public outrage to impose its speech codes on foreign corporations was in 2018 when the three biggest U.S. airlines — American, Delta, and United — agreed to list the capital city of Taiwan as “Chinese Taipei.” The Chinese government implicitly threatened to fine the airlines if they did not comply or even revoke their permits to operate in China.
In 2019, China pressured three major luxury clothing brands — America’s Coach, Italy’s Versace, and France’s Givenchy — into apologizing for selling shirts that depicted Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan as separate from China. The apologies were worded very much like the one Bulgari issued on Tuesday.
Calvin Klein was also forced to apologize for listing Taiwan as a separate country on its website in 2019.
In 2021, China targeted Swedish fashion giant Hennes & Mauritz (H&M) with threats of boycotts and bans from e-commerce platforms because the company expressed concerns about China using captive Uyghur Muslims as slaves. It took almost a year for a Chinese Communist youth front to notice the H&M statement and launch a social media campaign against the company.