This weekend, the cosmetics brand Lancome faced a dilemma involving two major international markets: It could alienate its customers in mainland China, or alienate its customers in Hong Kong.
Lancome went with alienating Hong Kong.
It all started with a concert. The brand had scheduled a free promotional event in Hong Kong featuring a performance by the Hong Kong-based Cantopop singer Denise Ho, an openly lesbian, outspoken pro-democracy advocate. Then on Saturday, the Beijing-based, Communist party-run newspaper Global Times attacked Ho’s liberal politics — it called her a “Hong Kong and Tibet independence advocate” in a microblog post — causing Chinese Internet users to call for a boycott of its products.
On Sunday night, Lancome canceled the event.
The move comes amid a major push by China’s Communist party to silence its critics abroad. Over the last year, pressure from Beijing has forced a South Korean theater to cancel a show by adherents of Falun Gong, a spiritual group which is banned in China. A crackdown on Hong Kong’s political publishing industry, marked by the apparent extraterritorial abductions of several booksellers, has cast a chill over the city’s once-fiery public sphere.
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