China is Evil, Part XXIX - and so is McDonald's, by Association

I like to follow a blog called The Raw Feed, mainly for its tech-related articles and common-sense advice. It also regularly offers a candid view of the many evils of China, which most media outlets choose to ignore.

This post is excellent, and I'll paste it here in its entirety. Thanks, Mike Elgan.

Shamelessly pandering to Chinese nationalism, the McDonald's corporation has chosen a slogan for a massive marketing campaign within China: "Wo jiu xihuan Zhongguo ying," which roughly translates as, "I LOVE IT WHEN CHINA WINS." This campaign is objectionable for 3 reasons:

1. There's a difference between national pride and nationalism; this slogan flat-out panders to the worse elements of Chinese nationalism, which is a weird emotion to exploit in order to sell junk food.

2. Everyone in China understands that goal #1 during the Olympics is to beat the United States in the medal count for the first time ever. That's a perfectly reasonable goal for the Chinese, but an odd goal for an American corporation.

3. Olympic competition between China and Western countries is in reality a competition between two approaches to the organization of athletic excellence. In the U.S., Japan, Europe, and elsewhere, athletes are amateurs who work day jobs, and do their sport out of love for the game. In China, children showing athletic promise are taken from their parents and placed into grueling training camps where they are forged into world-class athletes at the expense of their childhoods, families and, often, their futures. If athletes want to quit, they and their families are threatened with not being able to find work or worse. Read more about it here. By bolding saying that they want China to win, McDonald's is in fact advocating the Chinese system of Communist Party-enforced, work-camp style training over the voluntary for-the-love-of-sport approach in the West.

Why is McDonald's doing this? It's obvious: They want to sell junk food to China by pandering to nationalist feelings. But once this gets out, how will the knowledge that McDonald's "loves it when China wins" affect nationalist feeling here in the United States?