The soft power of China is infamously tremendous and often times amazing to witness. Yesterday I woke up to a tweet of wrestler-turned-actor John Cena apologizing in Chinese on video. There’s many dimension to how wild that is. First, John Cena speaks mandarin quite decently! As a speaker of three languages, I am a big fan of learning a second language. A white guy from Boston learning Chinese is just not something you expect to see. Good for John.
Second, Cena is apologizing to the people of mainland China for referring to Taiwan as a separate country. The faux pas happened during the current press tour for the ninth Fast and Furious movie (I can’t wait to see that in an actual theatre). Amongst the many things you absolutely cannot say vis a vis China, calling Taiwan a country is up there near the top. So of course Cena had to say sorry to the Chinese people, via the Sina Weibo social network.
Because third, had he not apologized, Cena is risking the financial future of anything he is attached to. The Fast and Furious franchise does huge money in China. Imagine if Cena’s slip-up cause the film to be banned there. There goes nine-figures of revenue right out the window. The movie studio cannot have that, obviously, which is why Cena had to quickly release a mea culpa, in what looks akin to a hostage video.
Just another day of doing business in the People’s Republic. If corporations want those numerous Chinese dollars, they must answer to ruling party. Boycotts and bans are swift. as the likes of H&M and Adidas found out recently.
On a similar vein, you won’t ever find me speaking negatively about China. I have many relatives living over there that I very much would like to visit often. Last thing I want to do, is say or write something careless and then get banned from entering my country of birth. Good thing websites hosted on Squarespace are blocked by the great firewall anyways…
It’s about that time.