Fiat tempts the Dragon

Friday, June 20, 2008

Fiat tempts the Dragon.

Continuing the theme of governments and corporations torturing themselves over which direction they have to walk in order not to have the wrath of Chinese nationalism directed towards them, Fiat has apologized for this ad:

Pretty outrageous isn’t it?

Sure, it’s a stupid idea for any company that hopes to boost its business in China to have anything to do with (1) Richard Gere, Tibetan Independence supporter for more than two decades, and (2) Tibet, the flashpoint for ire directed towards China in the lead-up to the Olympics.

Yet, does anything in the commercial actually merit an apology from Fiat? I’ve been trying to think of an analogous hypothetical in the US. The first thing that popped into my head was the funny image of Noam Chomsky driving a Boston Whaler through the flooded streets of post-Katrina New Orleans? Sean Penn? No, that’s quite the same -- too blatantly political, not to mention that Penn and Chomsky are both Americans.

I think it’d be funny to have a contest to think up a publicity scenario that would raise the same response from the US government, which includes neither inane criticism from groups*, as with the protests to the infamous Sicilian jihadist Rachel Ray’s Dunkin Donuts ad, nor personal objections for philosophical reasons to any given commercial. In what case would/has the US Government or the general population in the US object(ed) to a commercial for shear nationalistic reasons?

In the case of Fiat, though, they at least didn’t stop running the ad, so the apology wasn’t total acquiescence to the whims of the Chinese offense police. The damage, however, may already have been done, and Fiat will be paying the price.

The Tibet flap does not bode well for Fiat’s business in China, where it has a joint venture with local producer Chery Automobile to build 175,000 of its own-brand and Alfa Romeo cars in China from next year.

The Delta was meant to build the underperforming franchise outside Italy, where it sells about 80 per cent of its cars.

Which is quite different from the way Dior recently handled Sharon Stone’s recent comments on the Karmic catalyst for the Sichuan earthquake.

Christian Dior, the French fashion brand, has become the latest global company to learn a hard lesson about the danger of offending Chinese sensitivities.

Facing the possibility of a boycott of its products, the luxury company said Thursday that it had dropped the American actress Sharon Stone from its advertising in China after she suggested last week that the recent earthquakes in Sichuan Province were karmic retribution for how Beijing treated Tibet.

To be clear, my argument here is not that China should just sit down and take whatever the world throws at it, nor is it to say that all criticism of China is at all credible (after all, even the Dalai Lama himself isn’t even advocating Tibetan independence). It’s to say that China’s belief that it can dictate the image of China that the world sees, down to every minute detail, is absurd. Moreover, I think that China should be offended that the world sees it as a fragile Ming Vase.

If it wants to be the world player it sees in the mirror, then it’s going to have to thicken its skin a bit and deal with criticism at least with the minimal level of decorum that the Bush Administration has displayed over the last eight years. For instance, I don’t know of a movie that the administration has pulled due to an actors political statements. The same can’t be said for Stone’s newest film. The same can’t be said for films in China.

The PRC won’t change its policy towards the outside world, though, until companies and countries stop kowtowing to China as the “decider” of all that is offensive.

* in this case, ultra-conservative bloggers.

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