Tom Ashbrook

A lot of people seem shocked by China's heavy-handed retaliatory actions on Mbappé. They assumed once the Chinese understood the context - that the Mao meme was self-deprecating, that the "Chinese dictator" line was not malicious - the whole thing would get walked back as a giant misunderstanding. Let me explain why this kind of thinking is wrong, and why they were never going to backpedal. What happened to Mbappé is the modern version of that famous 1937 Stalin photo with Nikolai Yezhov. After Yezhov fell out of favor, the photo got retouched so comprehensively that the space where he had once stood was filled in with canal water and railing. It was as if he was never there. It's the same playbook here - once the system decided someone or something or some event is a problem, the record gets airbrushed until the problem no longer exists. Dan Wang, in his excellent book Breakneck, describes China as an engineering state run by technocrats who excel at construction and large-scale execution. He contrasts this with America’s lawyerly society that is process-heavy, rights-oriented, and tends to get stymied by obstruction. The same mindset that builds high-speed rail, factories, and manufacturing process knowledge also extends into social engineering that treats society, narratives, and public sentiment as systems to optimize. Wang’s examples include the One Child Policy and zero-COVID, both of which locked in once launched because the system prioritizes outcomes and consistency over flexible correction. You'll notice that the system tends to lurch to the extremes. These numbers - One Child, Zero Covid - are seriously autistic in its drive and focus to achieve overtly neat outcomes that are humanly impossible. The targets are unrealistic and sound like engineering specs, because leaders that are literal-minded end up seeing human activity as flows that can be turned on or off with valves. Mao remains the founding leader in official historiography; jokes or “dictator” labels challenge Party legitimacy and the narrative of national rejuvenation. Back in 2018, the Law on the Protection of Heroes and Martyrs came into effect which criminalizes the slander of those officially designated as heroes and martyrs. So once the reaction to Mbappé's clip ignited (Weibo outrage, coordinated brand statements), however erroneous it was, however much of a misunderstsanding it was, the engineering state executed a full response that left no room for nuance or de-escalation: > Chinese state media canceled La Liga broadcasts indefinitely > Companies dropped him > His face was scrubbed from all ads in China > His products were removed from shelves > Mbappé has been removed from Chinese versions of major football video games > Platforms muted or restricted accounts and promotional material that mentions him. While a lawyerly society such as ours might weigh context, free speech, the light tone, or other extenuating circumstances, the engineering state doesn't do that. It cannot self-correct mid-course. It is built to solve problems and the problem here is to protect heroes and martyrs, restore face, and deter future incidents. Partial retreat would leave the “problem” half-solved and look like incomplete execution. This is why the CCP proactively shapes historical memory and public sentiment. Mao’s status is non-negotiable. Tiananmen has to stay scrubbed from collective memory at all costs. Admitting the reaction was excessive or that the joke was harmless would concede ground on a foundational myth and imply the engineered social order is contestable. The funniest part is that the lengths they went to protect the narrative boundary meant they couldn’t even accurately report on what Mbappé said. “Chinese dictator” would itself be slandering a hero. So the Chinese people were told he had insulted China, with vague references to “inappropriate remarks.” Behind the Great Firewall, people are outraged and have purged Mbappé from everyday life while having no idea exactly why. It's basically like The Borg from Star Trek, operating as a hive-mind. Not to mention, "face" (面子) matters a lot in Chinese culture and the manic devotion to "saving face" makes about-turns almost impossible. This is why Mbappé’s, Javier Tebas’s, and Real Madrid’s apologies have zero impact. The engineering state acknowledged the apology (while still not being able to tell the Chinese people what it was for), but it will not meaningfully restore the contracts and licensing deals. The system is driven toward decisive, all-or-nothing execution on any problem it decides is important and to the Chinese, Mao is VERY important. Reversing course would be a public admission that the original solution was flawed. In a system that presents its policies as scientifically rational and historically correct, that’s moral and even civilizational suicide. That said, the system can be reversed. The one-child policy was eventually relaxed in 2015 and then ended. Zero-COVID was abandoned very abruptly in late 2022 after widespread protests (very rare in China), signaling that the costs of maintaining it was too high. What will likely happen here is what happened after the Chinese canceled the NBA and Houston Rockets over Daryl Morey's innocuous tweet supporting the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement in 2019. There will be no formal public reversal. Instead what you will see is a gradual and low-key restoration of the status quo. Daryl Morey left the Houston Rockets in 2020 and then by 2022, fully two and a half years later, Chinese state TV (CCTV) fully resumed regular NBA broadcasts. It was all very discreet. The lesson here is: never apologize. It's pointless. You only compromise your own integrity. The over-the-top reaction is a feature of the Chinese system, not a bug. It's not just because of different values, it's also because you're trying to do business with a culture that has implemented a specific institutional and cognitive style that treats society as yet another engineering problem to solve. There is no mechanism to self-correct so you just have to wait it out.