Summary
- A European soccer star called Mao a “dictator,” and China is furious.
- The soccer player and the team apologized, despite the fact that it was true.
- Europe is getting a hard lesson in what a China-led order will look like.
A European soccer star insinuated that Mao Zedong was a dictator, and China showed exactly how a powerful, dictatorial regime operates when it can.
Kylian Mbappé, a French soccer star who plays for Real Madrid, a Spanish team, stepped into a controversy made in China, but miserably endured by so many of the communist regime’s trade partners.
Given some of the reporting on this issue, you’d think that Mbappé had gone into a long lecture about Maoism and the danger of communist dictatorship.
But all that happened was that Mbappé was shown a picture of a meme that depicted him as Chairman Mao. Apparently, his teammates compare him to other dictators too because of his imperious personality. Mbappé commented that it was “some guy—I think he’s a Chinese dictator.” It wasn’t even clear he knew who Mao was.
That was enough to send China into a full-blown tizzy. Though exactly how much of this anger was real or fake is impossible to know because it has a tyrannical, dictatorial government created by “some guy” named Mao.
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More than a few online white knights for the Chinese Communist Party tried to argue that Americans would have acted the same way if an athlete in China had called George Washington a slave owner or something like that.
Please.
If we had noticed or cared at all, the strongest response would have been some lefty media outlet running an eyerolling profile of him as a brave representative of the oppressed global south.
China instead took a soccer player’s chuckle at a team inside joke as a grave, civilizational threat and did what it typically does in these situations. As reported by Reuters, it has engaged in “online outrage, corporate distancing, platform restrictions, and official intervention.”
I’ll say, there are certainly times to take aggressive action against insults to national honor. But as the kids used to say, this ain’t it, chief.
The proper response to China’s bullying should have been to ignore it and prepare for the storm.
The less proper, but far more satisfying response would be to post more memes, maybe of Winnie the Pooh or some other similarly mortifying insult to the “people” of China, or whatever propaganda apparatus decided to make a big deal of this whole thing.
Instead, unfortunately, Mbappé did what far too many people, organizations, and even governments in the West have done before: he groveled.
And so did the Real Madrid soccer team.
“Real Madrid C.F. wishes to express its apologies to the Chinese people for any discomfort that may have been caused by the recent words of our player Kylian Mbappé,” the team said in a statement, according to The Associated Press. “Our club holds deep respect for China, its history, its culture, and its citizens, as well as for the millions of Chinese fans who feel affection and admiration for Real Madrid.”
I need to interject in this pathetic kowtow ritual to note that the brutal communist government Mao led had no respect for “China, its history, its culture, and its citizens.” In fact, Mao and the party he led brutally murdered millions of Chinese citizens to stomp their people’s history and traditional Confucian culture out of existence.
Maybe that’s not in line with current CCP messaging, but it’s the truth.
Now I don’t want to go too far in accusing Europe as a whole of weakness here. Plenty of Americans and American companies have bowed and scraped to the almighty Chinese dollar. But we’re learning over here that sacrificing your pride, dignity, and reputation to help the CCP regime peddle untruth is a miserable, losing proposition. It’ll take your apology and punish you anyway, so you know your place in the future China-led order.
It’s noteworthy that while Chinese authorities said they have taken Mbappé’s apology “seriously,” they haven’t yet changed their mind about hard canceling him.
I think Americans have generally decided we still value our freedom just enough to start the process of the necessary disentanglement from a regime that means us harm.
That doesn’t seem to have happened in Europe yet. It gets its hyperventilating and throwing tantrums about the smallest slights from President Donald Trump. Yet it will go into cringe, supplicant mode to appease—and I’ll say it unequivocally—a dictatorial regime that ruthlessly squashes even the pettiest of memes that show its dear leader in a bad light.
Maybe Europeans feel more culturally aligned with China’s ideas about speech these days than with ours.
I’m only sort of joking.
Free speech or no, you would think that Europeans would at least feel some pride in their independence, right? They were apparently ready to go to war with the U.S. over Trump’s tough talk about Greenland, but China swooping in and telling them what can and can’t be said in their country is no big deal?
This makes me think of a book I read recently called “The Mighty Continent: A Candid History of Modern Europe.” The book, by the great historian Walter A. McDougall, is essentially the story of Europe from the Renaissance to modernity, and it paints the picture of Europe at its confident zenith (while prefacing its current downfall).
It’s hard to imagine the European nations through most of that history would have tolerated the haughty demands of a thin-skinned Eastern despot. Their own thin-skinned despot, maybe, but not a foreign one.
How the mighty have fallen. Europe now embraces a kind of comfortable decline; it shuts its eyes and closes its ears to even the most desperate crisis on its doorstep, and especially the ones in its house.
Europe falls back into the familiar warmth of sneering at and complaining about America and Trump, who has the audacity to treat Europe like a kid brother who needs his face shoved in the dirt to toughen him up against real, truly malignant threats.
So, I’ll say this as someone who really, truly hopes that our friends across the Atlantic figure things out. There was a serious lesson to be learned from the Mbappé episode. This is but a taste of life under a China-led order. They will use their economic and political leverage to ensure that the peoples of the world accept and even enforce the same narratives they force-feed their own people.
Their favor will be extended and retracted on a whim. They will do what they will and their dependents will do what they must. And that will be that.
Maybe it’s time to stop pleading for their blessing and start planning for a more independent future.
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