Feelings national interest c act as a deterrent to intern onal business. For example. Carrefour, t world's No. 2 retailer from France. faced a boycott in China in April 2008 because of pro-Tibet protests in Paris and President Sarkozy's threat to shun Olympic ceremonies Angry Chinese crowds gathered outside Chinese outlets of Carrefour to protest France's efforts to use the Beijing Olympics to pressure China on human rights and Tibet. Although Carrefour in reality did not have any involvemen in politics regarding the related issues, it s suffered largely from and faced the huge social pressures from Chinese people. Another striking example involves Dell Com puter As a manifestation of nationalistic sentiment, there were regular complaints from Dell China customers over the display of the Taiwan flag on the Dell Taiwan website. Dell Computer tried to placate these customers in China via various visual interface designs back in 2002. During the last Taiwan presidential election in 2005 Chinese customers again lodged another massive complaint Dell Computer over the flag issue. meticulous business plans As Dell Computer sees China a the main Executives at Dell Computer came to learn that polical events often supersede venue growth in Asia, the company has finally decided to remove all flags from Dell Asia-Pacific immediately for fear of a potential boycott of Dell products websites n China. At the time of this writing, therefore, t are no flag displays for China Taiwan. Korea. India, Vietnam, and other Asian countries, except De Singapore. Japan, which retained i own flag display since it is considered a separate business entity from the Asia-Pacific segment (due to maturity of its customer base and purchasing power) of course, since Dell Computer is dealing with nationalistic sensitivities, it could be only a matter of time before China suddenly realize the Chinese flag not being displayed while Dell Japan s flag display. Corporate diplomacy can indeed be very de As one ex-De executive confides, "One can never foresee possibes, but as marketers we need to plan for such contingencies.