ThinkMan

I know a lot of people in the West are baffled by the Mbappé-Mao storm in China - which in itself shows that Mbappé's ignorance doesn't come out of nowhere... To understand it, here's the best analogy I could think of: imagine the biggest Chinese star in the NBA, with sponsorship deals all over the US. One day he's asked for his favorite meme of himself. He giggles: "the one where they put my face on some guy, I think he was an American slave owner." When the "some guy" in question is George Washington. Whatever you think of the label, you know exactly how that would land in the US: an ungrateful foreigner getting rich off Americans, laughing at the country's founding father in an offensive way - at least to a big share of the population - without even knowing his name. A founding father is the story a nation tells itself about where it comes from. Laugh at him as a foreigner while cashing in on that nation's consumers, and that's not going to go well in any country. The label is also extremely un-nuanced: yes, all important historical figures have their share of darkness and Washington and Mao are no exception. China actually recognizes this: the official line is that he was "70% right and 30% wrong," and the Party's 1981 resolution condemned how his "personal arbitrariness gradually undermined democratic centralism in Party life and the personality cult grew graver and graver" (marxists.org/subject/china/d…) Same for Washington: it's officially acknowledged too. Or at least it was until this year: in January, the National Park Service tore down an exhibit in Philadelphia about the people Washington enslaved there, under a Trump executive order targeting content that "inappropriately disparage[s]" Americans (associationforpublicart.org/…). Which goes to show China isn't uniquely touchy about its founding father...