This again. The government of the People’s Republic of China has suspended sports broadcasts because an athlete, Kylian Mbappé, referred to Mao Zedong—“the country’s former paramount leader,” also its paramount mass murderer—as a “dictator” (The Cable, October 27, 2026).
In a statement on Tuesday, the state-owned China Media Group, which oversees public broadcaster CCTV, said it had suspended La Liga match broadcasts and advertisements following the player’s comment in a viral video.
In the viral video at the centre of the controversy, Mbappé [shown above], who has been jokingly styled online as a dictator in recent months, was asked which of the memes caricaturing him as an autocrat he finds funniest. The Frenchman replied with “I think it’s a Chinese dictator”. He then laughed when he was shown a meme with his face edited onto an image of Mao.
Mao chaired the ruling Chinese Communist Party for 33 years. Critics abroad described his regime as totalitarian. His reforms led to millions of Chinese deaths from famine. However, Mao remains a revered figure in China.
Major Chinese brands, including beverage giant Dongpeng, have cancelled their commercial deals with Mbappé over the comment.
You don’t need those deals, Mbappé. Don’t apologize.
Too late. He has apologized—to whichever Chinese are offended by facts about China’s unfortunate past. “I apologise to everyone whom my words upset, as that was never my intention at all. I hold deep respect for the Chinese people and their history, and I express my sincere regret.”
Good God. “Deep respect” for the Chinese people, for their history…and for Mao?
What if Mbappé’s new words have upset the millions of victims of the Chinese Communist Party? Will there be another apology? But maybe those victims lack the ability to cancel broadcasts and sponsorship deals.
Mbappé faced a backlash Tuesday over comments he made in an online interview, losing brand deals with at least three different Chinese companies. Beverage maker Dongpeng, dairy giant Mengniu and cheese maker Milkground said in similarly worded statements that they were ending agreements with the star forward, each saying they oppose “any words and actions that hurt national sentiment.”…
It remains to be seen whether Mbappé’s apology will help him regain the brand deals or other businesses he lost Tuesday. His team’s games remained unavailable to viewers in China Wednesday.
Xi on Mao
Xi Jinping has said that Mao was “a great Marxist, a great proletarian revolutionary, strategist, and theoretician, a great pioneer of the Sinicisation of Marxism, a great founder of China’s socialist modernization, a great patriot and national hero of China in modern times, the core of the party’s first generation of central collective leadership…and a great internationalist who made major contributions to the liberation of the oppressed nations of the world and the cause of human progress…. Comrade Mao Zedong’s life was a life of unremitting struggle for the prosperity and strength of the country, the rejuvenation of the nation, and the happiness of the people.”
Of course, there was a Cultural Revolution, etc., the components of which Xi, the current CCP dictator, carefully fails to specify. Mao took a few “detours in the exploration of the road of socialist construction,” Xi allows. These kinds of “mistakes,” though, “are the mistakes made by a great revolutionary and a great Marxist.”
Anybody determined to talk up Mao can go on like this indefinitely, omitting all mention of any of the actual specifics of all the things that actually happened and that Mao and others actually did, again and again, and why. Mao was a dictator. He was also a sadist who enjoyed humiliating, torturing and killing people and who found a way to do this on the largest possible scale for decades.
Also see:
Time: “How a Quickly-Deleted Tweet About China Got Pretty Much Everyone Mad at the NBA” (October 7, 2019)
Jung Chang: “Mao: The Unknown Story”
