This will be a shorter entry today, but one of the most famous athletes in the world is at the center of an international controversy involving memes and the Chinese state, so yes, of course I’d like to marvel at the madness. If you missed it this week, Reuters has a rundown of the Mbappé-Mao Zedong brouhaha:
Real Madrid forward Kylian Mbappé’s rapid fall from favor in China after remarks about Mao Zedong followed a familiar pattern: online outrage, corporate distancing, platform restrictions and official intervention.
Within 24 hours of a podcast clip surfacing in which the France captain referred to Mao as “some guy – I think he’s a Chinese dictator”, sponsors including Mengniu Dairy, Shanghai Milkground and energy drink-maker Eastroc ended cooperation with the footballer.
State broadcaster CCTV removed Mbappé-related advertising and Chinese social media platforms restricted access to his accounts. Mbappé apologised on Tuesday, describing his remarks as “ill-judged”.
And for anyone who’s curious—isn’t everyone?—the comments at issue were from a behind-the-scenes “extras” clip, released after an interview that was apparently conducted in April. In the bonus clip, Mbappé was asked a variety of quick-hitting questions while makeup was applied before the main show. That’s when he mentioned a meme in which he’s photoshopped onto various illustrations of Mao Zedong.
His exact words, translated from French:
Question: “What meme with your face made you laugh the most?”
Answer: “Well, there are tons of them. The one that made me laugh the most was when someone took a video of a guy. I think it was a Chinese dictator. And they added my face to it. … I use it a lot with my friends online, you know, while playing on the PlayStation.”
And here (I think) is the video he’s referencing:
There have also been reports that CCTV has indefinitely suspended broadcasts of La Liga matches, particularly any matches involving Mbappé and Real Madrid (arguably the most famous soccer team in the world).
And of course, there’s been a good bit of jersey burning, while physical ads featuring Mbappé are being hidden and defaced.
The damage to Mbappé personally will be in the tens of millions of dollars in lost endorsements, but La Liga’s deals in China are reportedly worth more than $100 million annually. That money is presumably disbursed across all players and teams, making this a considerably more serious problem. Hence mewling statements from Mbappé himself, Real Madrid, and La Liga, whose president met this week with China’s Ambassador to Spain, Yao Jing, to “find solutions” to the whole affair.
I have a few different takes on all this, but if you’ll indulge just a bit more context, I was amused to see on Wednesday that Real Madrid’s apology was deemed insufficient by China’s state broadcaster:
We have taken note of Real Madrid’s public statement. Yesterday and today, the president of La Liga and other relevant parties have repeatedly sent letters to China Media Group expressing public apologies. We believe that Mbappé’s outrageous remarks have already caused harm to the Chinese people, crossed a red line, and gone beyond the bounds of freedom of speech. Mbappé is a Real Madrid player, and the club cannot shirk responsibility. Therefore, we do not accept Real Madrid’s insistence that Mbappé ‘never intended to offend anyone and, at the same time, maintains that players have the right to express their personal views.’ We reject Real Madrid’s position.
We can only speculate as to why authorities have chosen to fan these flames now (a useful distraction from a crashing stock market and a variety of other domestic issues?), but whatever the motivations, that CCTV statement is a sign that while the foreign ministry sounds ready to move on, certain elements of the CCP are not quite done making hay of this story.
Finally, one particularly dystopian feature of scandals like this is that the words that spark mass hysteria are often hidden from citizens who might want to learn more about why, for example, it’s suddenly essential that all these brands denounce one of the most famous athletes in the world. This sort of thing can happen with cancellation episodes in the United States as well, but it’s particularly pronounced in China, where censors are being accused of deleting comments and stoking outrage. Here’s Reuters again, on the opacity among citizens:
A central question in [these] episodes is how much of the backlash reflects genuine public anger and how much is amplified by state media, online platforms and official actors. The Mbappé case illustrates how difficult that distinction can be to draw. As the controversy unfolded, the original comments about Mao were largely inaccessible on China’s heavily censored internet. Many consumers were therefore exposed less to what Mbappé said than to reports that sponsors had dropped him and official media were condemning him.
Just to be clear: when Reuters refers to the “original comments about Mao”, those comments 1) did not mention Mao Zedong by name; 2) accurately described Mao as a Chinese dictator; and 3) broadly referenced a nickname the internet gave Mbappé (“Dictator”) and a series of memes featuring various dictators that began circulating as early as 2024.
Goebbels, Mao and Xi Jinping
As evidence that my brain is permanently corrupted by internet nonsense, I was fully aware of the dictator Mbappé memes, and when I saw Real Madrid’s apology, I was reminded that only a few weeks ago the team had to release an official statement denouncing a La Liga executive who compared “the methods of the Real Madrid management to those employed by Joseph Goebbels.” Never a dull moment in international soccer!
As for China and its definitely-not-autocratic government: back in June when I explained my reaction to Steph Curry signing a $400 million endorsement deal with Li-Ning, I noted in passing that I find it depressing to see the American left ignore the Hitler-adjacent history of death and misery under Mao. Hasan Piker dresses like him and was thrilled to receive a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book during a trip to China almost exactly one year ago. No one on the left seems to have a problem with any of that.
Leave it to the infinite wisdom of Beijing, then, to nevertheless find a way to galvanize much of the Western world behind a conversation about Mao and historical accuracy. This statement from the China Select Committee covers that angle well:
International soccer star Kylian Mbappé should not apologize for calling Mao Zedong a dictator. Mao was a dictator, and by orders of magnitude, he did more harm to the Chinese people than a comment from a soccer player ever could. Mao was the leader of the CCP for decades and his dictatorship and disastrous policies killed tens of millions of Chinese people in the Cultural Revolution, the Great Famine, and other atrocities.
Involved in the Party from its first national meeting in 1921, Mao is the principal historical figure for a Party that continues his practices of oppression and ideological purges. For decades, the CCP has denied the Chinese people basic human rights including freedom of expression and freedom of religion. These are rights enjoyed by Mbappé and millions of people around the world and Mbappé should exercise this opportunity to tell the horrific truth about Mao’s dictatorship. The real disgrace in this news story is the companies rushing to apologize so they can continue to do business in China. The CCP is the largest oppressor of the Chinese people and their human rights, and those businesses that work with the CCP help normalize its crushing brutality.
For the record, in a 1949 speech commemorating the 28th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao came by the dictator label honestly:
“You are dictatorial.” My dear sirs, you are right, that is just what we are. All the experience the Chinese people have accumulated through several decades teaches us to enforce the people’s democratic dictatorship, that is, to deprive the reactionaries of the right to speak and let the people alone have that right.
Whatever the Party wants to do behind the firewall to confuse its own people, the reality of his governing legacy is plain for everyone else to see. And without making this week’s news more than what it was—an enjoyably low-stakes controversy that will pass, but crazy enough to document for posterity—I do think there are two lessons from this affair that are more durable.
First, when the PRC wields money as leverage and tries to impose its speech restrictions on the rest of the world, what’s implicit is that the rest of the world is required to lie about objective reality. This isn’t propaganda; it’s lying. Whether it’s the origins of Covid-19, Chinese swimmers doping, the realities in Hong Kong, Taiwan’s sovereignty, repression of the Uyghurs… You can either not discuss those issues (a lie by omission) or lie about them outright. That’s the deal, and that’s what the money is for. This is why Eileen Gu needs to read more about Xinjiang before she can form an opinion. The inverse of that story is an Australian reporter who was separated from her kids and detained for three years, probably because her government dared to ask questions about Covid. In any case, this week’s news was remarkable only because it laid the terms especially bare if the requirement for the rest of the world is to not call Mao a dictator.
The second lesson is that the Party under Xi Jinping simply can’t get out of its own way. Ever. For all their efforts at relaxing VISA restrictions for visitors, framing the U.S. as reckless, or telling China’s story well, stories like this one provide a much louder reminder to to the world that China is still an often-paranoid and chronically authoritarian state, where companies and citizens can be mobilized on a whim if it serves the Party’s opaque aims. Facing down a trade war with Europe, they are seeking to humiliate a French national hero who doesn’t even know who Mao Zedong is. It’s so senseless and embarrassing, yet completely unsurprising.
There are plenty of people in D.C. who have warned about the implications of a “Chinese Century”, but I for one do not lie awake at night worried about the possibility. In 1949 Mao finished his speech by saying, “This dictatorship must unite as one with the international revolutionary forces.” He got the dictatorship part right, but uniting with international forces? Now is probably a good time to note that the Soviet Union failed, while China under Mao lagged the growth of most of its Asian peers. It was Deng Xiaopeng, not Mao, who opened China to the world and supercharged its transformation to bring an entire generation out of poverty. Meanwhile, 30 years later, propaganda organs have begun calling Xi “the People’s Leader” this week, an honorific previously reserved for Mao. And sure enough, foreign investment in China is 77% lower than it was five years ago.
The liberal values that built the Western world are a political threat to the Communist Party, and Xi understands that better than anyone. The problem is that his Party’s attempts to resolve that tension are clumsy, overzealous, and destined to create a world in which plenty of foreigners take Chinese money but no one is stupid enough to trust the Chinese government. What happened to Kylian Mbappé is an example of why a world dependent on China would be problematic, sure, but it’s also an example of why that future will never be realized.
Sharp Text is extension of the Stratechery Plus podcasts Sharp Tech, Greatest of All Talk, and Sharp China. To subscribe and receive weekly posts via email, click here.