McDonald’s Hates It When America Wins

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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.” that campaign is objectionable for 3 reasons:

1. There’s a difference amidst national pride and nationalism; that 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 moment ever. That’s a perfectly fair goal for the Chinese, but an odd goal for an American corporation.

3. Olympic competition amoung China and Western countries is in reality a competition amoung 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. whether 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 by the voluntary for-the-love-of-sport approach in the West.

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

Original post by Mike

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 5th, 2008 at 8:23 am and is filed under Gadget News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.