Brad Hubert

José Mourinho, strong as he is, has conceded the point. The point is self-censorship. China is not a football power by any stretch of the imagination. Its national team is subpar given its size and economic heft, its domestic league a money-pit for washed-up European players, and its contribution to the actual game is negligible. Yet one offhand joke by Kylian Mbappé about a meme that slapped his face on Mao Zedong was enough to get Chinese state television to cancel La Liga broadcasts, sponsors to dump him, and the entire Spanish league to issue a groveling apology while promising “sensitization protocols” and awareness training for clubs and players so it never happens again. "Awareness and communication protocols" is literally what Javier Tebas, the head of La Liga, is proposing. This is the same man who had no problem accusing Real Madrid's management of behaving like Nazi chief Joseph Goebbels. Do you realize how Orwellian this is? During Woke 1, the publishing industry started mandating sensitivity-readers to make sure nothing "offensive" is printed. Now it's being applied to sport. A player says something that is factually unremarkable (Mao ran a dictatorship and said so himself) and the institutional response is not to defend speech or shrug at a meme. It is to apologize profusely and create internal machinery that teaches everyone the new red lines so that the revenue stream is protected. José Mourinho’s advice here, that sometimes the best thing is to keep your mouth shut, is the honest description of the mental trade-off here. The whole point of the Chinese imposing disproportionate responses to Mbappé's slight is to create a world where self-censorship is the default. The bargain we were sold was that integrating China into the global economic system would liberalize it. We were told that exposure to open societies and commercial incentives would, over time, erode the Party’s control. What has happened instead is the reverse. Chinese authorities treat access to their market as a political lever and foreign institutions treat that lever as a reason to overhaul its own norms to resemble what the CCP wants. The same pattern appears in film studios quietly cutting scenes, in brands pre-clearing statements, in sports bodies inventing protocols so no one ever again accurately describes history in the presence of Chinese money. China does not need to win on the pitch, or dominate box office, or even lead in technology. It only needs enough economic weight that other people police themselves on its behalf. This distortion is occurring in EVERY domain - trade, investment, entertainment, corporate governance, sport, education, etc. A country that still jails people for memes about its founding leader now effectively sets the boundaries of acceptable speech for European football leagues, and the weak ass global footballing brands and leagues cooperate.

A lot of people seem shocked by China's heavy-handed retaliatory actions on Mbappé. They assumed once the Chinese understood the context - that the Mao meme was self-deprecating, that the "Chinese dictator" line was not malicious - the whole thing would get walked back as a giant misunderstanding. Let me explain why this kind of thinking is wrong, and why they were never going to backpedal. What happened to Mbappé is the modern version of that famous 1937 Stalin photo with Nikolai Yezhov. After Yezhov fell out of favor, the photo got retouched so comprehensively that the space where he had once stood was filled in with canal water and railing. It was as if he was never there. It's the same playbook here - once the system decided someone or something or some event is a problem, the record gets airbrushed until the problem no longer exists. Dan Wang, in his excellent book Breakneck, describes China as an engineering state run by technocrats who excel at construction and large-scale execution. He contrasts this with America’s lawyerly society that is process-heavy, rights-oriented, and tends to get stymied by obstruction. The same mindset that builds high-speed rail, factories, and manufacturing process knowledge also extends into social engineering that treats society, narratives, and public sentiment as systems to optimize. Wang’s examples include the One Child Policy and zero-COVID, both of which locked in once launched because the system prioritizes outcomes and consistency over flexible correction. You'll notice that the system tends to lurch to the extremes. These numbers - One Child, Zero Covid - are seriously autistic in its drive and focus to achieve overtly neat outcomes that are humanly impossible. The targets are unrealistic and sound like engineering specs, because leaders that are literal-minded end up seeing human activity as flows that can be turned on or off with valves. Mao remains the founding leader in official historiography; jokes or “dictator” labels challenge Party legitimacy and the narrative of national rejuvenation. Back in 2018, the Law on the Protection of Heroes and Martyrs came into effect which criminalizes the slander of those officially designated as heroes and martyrs. So once the reaction to Mbappé's clip ignited (Weibo outrage, coordinated brand statements), however erroneous it was, however much of a misunderstsanding it was, the engineering state executed a full response that left no room for nuance or de-escalation: > Chinese state media canceled La Liga broadcasts indefinitely > Companies dropped him > His face was scrubbed from all ads in China > His products were removed from shelves > Mbappé has been removed from Chinese versions of major football video games > Platforms muted or restricted accounts and promotional material that mentions him. While a lawyerly society such as ours might weigh context, free speech, the light tone, or other extenuating circumstances, the engineering state doesn't do that. It cannot self-correct mid-course. It is built to solve problems and the problem here is to protect heroes and martyrs, restore face, and deter future incidents. Partial retreat would leave the “problem” half-solved and look like incomplete execution. This is why the CCP proactively shapes historical memory and public sentiment. Mao’s status is non-negotiable. Tiananmen has to stay scrubbed from collective memory at all costs. Admitting the reaction was excessive or that the joke was harmless would concede ground on a foundational myth and imply the engineered social order is contestable. The funniest part is that the lengths they went to protect the narrative boundary meant they couldn’t even accurately report on what Mbappé said. “Chinese dictator” would itself be slandering a hero. So the Chinese people were told he had insulted China, with vague references to “inappropriate remarks.” Behind the Great Firewall, people are outraged and have purged Mbappé from everyday life while having no idea exactly why. It's basically like The Borg from Star Trek, operating as a hive-mind. Not to mention, "face" (面子) matters a lot in Chinese culture and the manic devotion to "saving face" makes about-turns almost impossible. This is why Mbappé’s, Javier Tebas’s, and Real Madrid’s apologies have zero impact. The engineering state acknowledged the apology (while still not being able to tell the Chinese people what it was for), but it will not meaningfully restore the contracts and licensing deals. The system is driven toward decisive, all-or-nothing execution on any problem it decides is important and to the Chinese, Mao is VERY important. Reversing course would be a public admission that the original solution was flawed. In a system that presents its policies as scientifically rational and historically correct, that’s moral and even civilizational suicide. That said, the system can be reversed. The one-child policy was eventually relaxed in 2015 and then ended. Zero-COVID was abandoned very abruptly in late 2022 after widespread protests (very rare in China), signaling that the costs of maintaining it was too high. What will likely happen here is what happened after the Chinese canceled the NBA and Houston Rockets over Daryl Morey's innocuous tweet supporting the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement in 2019. There will be no formal public reversal. Instead what you will see is a gradual and low-key restoration of the status quo. Daryl Morey left the Houston Rockets in 2020 and then by 2022, fully two and a half years later, Chinese state TV (CCTV) fully resumed regular NBA broadcasts. It was all very discreet. The lesson here is: never apologize. It's pointless. You only compromise your own integrity. The over-the-top reaction is a feature of the Chinese system, not a bug. It's not just because of different values, it's also because you're trying to do business with a culture that has implemented a specific institutional and cognitive style that treats society as yet another engineering problem to solve. There is no mechanism to self-correct so you just have to wait it out.