Boycotting the French

By Chip Tsao | published Dec 11, 2008

The French president Nicolas Sarkozy has angered the Chinese again by meeting with the Dalai Lama in Poland. The Chinese people, who by now must have lost count of how many times their fragile feelings have been hurt after their orders were disobeyed by the West, have called for another boycott of French products. But this time it is the French who are crying out for reprisals on the internet, saying non to all goods made in China.

The Chinese netizens are no doubt stunned by these Frenchmen who dared to answer back. And it will be interesting to see how severely the French will be reprimanded for this, as the first boycott of French products proved to be short-lived earlier this year. Remember how the mobs besieged the French supermarket Carrefour in China to protest the French people’s tolerance of pro-Tibetan demonstrations in Paris during the Olympic torch relay? The scene was so spectacular that I almost feared the Carrefour shops in Shanghai and Wuhan—standing there as the symbols of Western economic imperialism—would soon fall like the Bastille.

Or do you remember when Chinese tourists stopped raiding the LV department stores in Paris, or when Chinese students and illegal immigrants in Paris all shipped off back to China (to the relief of Le Pen), and thereby gave back the peace the city has lost, restoring its status as a truly romantic place where Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman cherished their “at least we had Paris” memory? You probably don’t remember this because it never happened. By the order of the government, the mobs shut up, and soon it was business as usual, with Cantonese gourmets washing down their bowls of dog and cat meat in the cool autumn breeze with bottles of the 1986 Lafitte, while Paris is still full of Chinese shoppers hulking after French handbags and perfume.

So this time the French have called their bluff, and they may have a stronger point. They know that in case of a mutual boycott of each other’s products, the Chinese would lose some of their vanity status symbols (apart from China’s small proportion of 1.4% of the total French export market), while the French would benefit greatly in terms of health. But one mustn’t underestimate the wrath of the rising Oriental giant—while the Chinese might not go so far as to ally themselves with Al-Queda to blow up the Eiffel Tower to show the French our dismay, we do have money. We are financially strong enough to buy up the best vineyards in Provence and turn that heavenly land into a series of paddy fields scattered with a few pig-farms. Or what about buying a few paintings like Van Gogh’s sunflowers or Monet’s water-lily ponds, piling them up at Tiananmen Square and blazing them with a match like the Emperor Qin burning books? De Gaulle could afford to tell the Americans to get out of his face and pursue an independent diplomacy, but I doubt Sarkozy has the same muscle. Cash talks louder than the gun nowadays, so we can let Carrefour get away again with their crime this time, but don’t abuse our magnamity, Mr. Sarkozy, and don’t do it again.