The boss of the leader of the bottled water market in China, the country’s largest fortune, finds himself facing a barrage of criticism from the most virulent Internet users in the Middle Kingdom, proof that no one is safe of this type of wave, which mainly affected foreign groups in the past. Zhong Shanshan, founder of Nongfu Spring, and his company are being attacked online for an unfortunate design choice for a bottle of iced green tea.
The label shows a traditional East Asian building, and some nationalists see, particularly in the blue tint of the roof, the image of a Japanese temple. They criticize this reference to the culture of an enemy country and the desire to pass off the product as foreign, while patriots should be proud to consume Chinese – which they do more and more, as local brands are moving upmarket. The group explained that the drawing actually refers to Chinese temples, but the hardest ones didn’t want to hear anything.
In Jiangsu province, two stores of the 7-Eleven chain put up posters explaining that they would no longer distribute water and other Nongfu products, despite messages from headquarters specifying that it did not support the approach. Internet users filmed themselves emptying Nongfu bottles into toilets.
“Very unstable Sino-American relations”
The debate has since shifted to the person of Zhong Shanshan and his family, in particular his son, Zhong Shuzi, who is a citizen of the United States. On Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, the commentator Li Ji, with his 5.3 million followers, did not hesitate to declare, Monday March 11: “If he intends to maintain the interests of Nongfu Spring, I would suggest that Zhong Shanshan persuade his son to renounce American citizenship (…). Sino-US relations are very unstable, with serious ideological antagonisms, and the United States is increasingly imposing unreasonable sanctions on Chinese companies. »
Foreign companies targeting the Chinese market already live in fear of being the target of this popular wrath, as were the Carrefour hypermarkets in 2008, after the agitated passage of the Olympic flame in France, ahead of the Olympic Games. Beijing summer.
But also the clothing brand H&M, in 2021, for announcing that it would stop sourcing cotton from the Xinjiang region, where the United Nations, international NGOs and the foreign press denounce internment in camps re-education and forced labor imposed on the Uighur minority.
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