Odaily

José Mourinho, strong as he is, has conceded the point. The point is self-censorship. China is not a football power by any stretch of the imagination. Its national team is subpar given its size and economic heft, its domestic league a money-pit for washed-up European players, and its contribution to the actual game is negligible. Yet one offhand joke by Kylian Mbappé about a meme that slapped his face on Mao Zedong was enough to get Chinese state television to cancel La Liga broadcasts, sponsors to dump him, and the entire Spanish league to issue a groveling apology while promising “sensitization protocols” and awareness training for clubs and players so it never happens again. "Awareness and communication protocols" is literally what Javier Tebas, the head of La Liga, is proposing. This is the same man who had no problem accusing Real Madrid's management of behaving like Nazi chief Joseph Goebbels. Do you realize how Orwellian this is? During Woke 1, the publishing industry started mandating sensitivity-readers to make sure nothing "offensive" is printed. Now it's being applied to sport. A player says something that is factually unremarkable (Mao ran a dictatorship and said so himself) and the institutional response is not to defend speech or shrug at a meme. It is to apologize profusely and create internal machinery that teaches everyone the new red lines so that the revenue stream is protected. José Mourinho’s advice here, that sometimes the best thing is to keep your mouth shut, is the honest description of the mental trade-off here. The whole point of the Chinese imposing disproportionate responses to Mbappé's slight is to create a world where self-censorship is the default. The bargain we were sold was that integrating China into the global economic system would liberalize it. We were told that exposure to open societies and commercial incentives would, over time, erode the Party’s control. What has happened instead is the reverse. Chinese authorities treat access to their market as a political lever and foreign institutions treat that lever as a reason to overhaul its own norms to resemble what the CCP wants. The same pattern appears in film studios quietly cutting scenes, in brands pre-clearing statements, in sports bodies inventing protocols so no one ever again accurately describes history in the presence of Chinese money. China does not need to win on the pitch, or dominate box office, or even lead in technology. It only needs enough economic weight that other people police themselves on its behalf. This distortion is occurring in EVERY domain - trade, investment, entertainment, corporate governance, sport, education, etc. A country that still jails people for memes about its founding leader now effectively sets the boundaries of acceptable speech for European football leagues, and the weak ass global footballing brands and leagues cooperate.