Manufactured outrage can be a potent political weapon, but it easily gets out of hand—especially when magnified by powerful social-media accounts in an environment free of alternative perspectives.
That is roughly the situation major global fashion brands like H&M are now facing in China, the world’s largest consumer market. The cause is their decision not to use cotton from the country’s Xinjiang region, where the government has been accused of major human-rights abuses including forced labor and large-scale internment of the Turkic Uyghur minority.
H&M and its stores have found themselves more or less erased from e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and even Chinese mapping and ride-hailing services such as Baidu Maps and Didi Chuxing. The list of foreign companies targeted by Beijing for crossing ever-shifting nationalist red lines is long—the National Basketball Association, Korean retail brand Lotte, FedEx , and hotel chain Marriott, to name just a few. But the censure aimed directly at H&M is nearly unprecedented, and sends a deeply worrying signal to other Western consumer brands operating in China.
There is no easy way out, particularly for those, like Nike , which have made a point of their support for U.S. social movements like Black Lives Matter. Western consumer brands will increasingly have to choose between customers back home, who find situations like the one in Xinjiang abhorrent, and Chinese consumers who often don’t realize the full extent of what their government is doing and are surrounded by media that depict any criticism of Beijing as a hypocritical attempt to keep China down.
As long as China’s media landscape remains as tightly controlled as it is today, and overall relations with the West remain fraught, it is hard to imagine the situation improving. That is particularly true because not all online criticism originally comes from Beijing itself. Sometimes it is just official accounts trying to catch up, making flare-ups difficult to predict or head off with negotiations behind the scene.
