4.5. Identity
The Forbidden City Starbucks shop aimed to share the same identity along with other Starbucks outlets across the country. However, Rui, through his personal blog, brought up his own meaning-making of the Starbucks shop inside the Forbidden City. His message strategically activated the collective memory of China's humiliation in the 19th and 20th century. For example, a blog viewer commented,
[A]fter all, the Forbidden City is a representative of the Chinese culture. The [presence] of a foreign business always makes me uncomfortable. When I see the Starbucks against the repaired broken wall inside the Forbidden City, I cannot help recalling the invasion of the Eight-Power Allied Forces, as well as the burning, killing, robbing, and plundering in the Old Summer Palace exercised by the British and French Allied Forces [in the late Qing Dynasty] ( Sun, 2007).
Similarly, another viewer wrote, “the Starbucks [inside the Forbidden City] indeed was an affront to the image of traditional Chinese culture, and it should go away as soon as possible. Good job, Chenggang [Rui]” (Comments on Rui's post, 12 January 2007). Still, one more said, “[we] ceded the country's sovereignty under humiliating terms. [We] have suffered from military invasions before, now again from the economic invasion. They are the same. Why do we have to have a coffee shop [inside the Forbidden City], instead of a tea house? Are the former superior to the latter” (Comments on Rui's post, 12 January 2007)?
As these comments illustrate, to Rui and other online activists, projecting Starbucks coffee as a representative of a Western experience jars with the Chinese national pride innately associated with the Forbidden City. They consider Starbucks's “coffee culture” to be the equal of Western-style “fast food culture,” which they argued is inferior and has eroded or insulted the stateliness of the “museum culture” embedded in the Forbidden City (Yang, 2007). The identity of Westernization is incompatible with the nationalistic identity that the Forbidden City is pinned down to. This Starbucks shop “might represent another ‘ugly American’ who lacked respect for cultural norms” (Curtin & Gaither, 2005, p. 106). Web-based activists’ meaning-making of the particular Starbucks shop revealed that the issue has never been about coffee or drinks per se, but a venue exuding tension and conflicts, where “a culture of corporate power competes with traditional Chinese cultures and values” (p. 86). It is the American corporate culture that has invaded into the heart of Beijing without any resistance from its business partners and its consumers in China. It is also the Starbucks shop that enforces a form of neo-colonialism, through the expansion of its business in China.
As a result, the collaboration between Rui and his blog viewers jointly created the perception that the identity intrinsic to the Starbucks shop contradicts the identity that the Forbidden City represents and intends to preserve. This resonates well with what Curtin and Gaither have elaborated, consumers “drank a brand for what it stood for and what it said about them–for the identification it fostered between the product and their own lives” (2007, p. 47). Starbucks, a U.S. company, is imposing its product and image on China, even if it is running a legitimate business. Therefore, Rui and his supporters believed that the Starbucks coffeehouse inside the Forbidden City was out of place and should be removed.
A look at the five moments of cultural circuit as a whole reveals that in this informal public relations campaign, Rui served as an opinion leader utilizing his blog to deliberate what it meant to have a Starbucks outlet within the Forbidden City. Web activists’ comments and discussions further facilitated Rui's meaning-making of the Forbidden City Starbucks shop. The unique nature of Weblogs in a nationalistic context additionally played out the tension surrounding the conflicting identities between the Starbucks shop and the Forbidden City. As Rui observed, “What?! Where did this come from? I see it as a pollution of the integrity of the Forbidden City, which is the epitome of the Chinese culture” (Rui, 2007a). Similarly, many Chinese blog viewers have concurred that they do not resent coffee, the physical product itself. Rather, they resent the message hidden in the Starbucks coffee: traditional Chinese cultural assets are being threatened by U.S. popular culture.
Furthermore, Rui's blog posts not only brought out much coverage, but also invoked a heated debate in mainstream news media on the presence of Starbucks in the Forbidden City. Although there were opinions divergent from Rui's expressed in Chinese newspapers (e.g. Zhu, 2007; Beijing News, 17 January 2007), Rui's protest was so strongly supported that it had become the predominant voice (e.g., Lin, 2007).
To respond to Rui and other online activists, the Starbucks shop did make efforts to merge into the overall theme of the Forbidden City. For instance, its exterior design features a façade resembling that of other Forbidden City buildings, giving no indication that it housed a Starbucks (Johnson, 2007, p. A2). However hard did it try to be unobtrusive, unfortunately, Starbucks failed to appease the public.
Moreover, the online protests were captured on the radar screen of government officials and legislators. For instance, according to Xinhua News Agency (2007), state legislator Hongbin Jiang proposed a bill in March 2007 asking “Starbucks to move out of the Forbidden City…[because its] presence is challenging [Chinese] national identity and dignity”.
News media and legislators jointly intensified their pressure on the management of the Palace Museum, one of the stakeholders involved in this issue, urging it to work with Starbucks in order to find a solution in response to the protesters. The Palace Museum carried out a “change or go home” policy, calling for Starbucks to restructure its independent operation and to join a kiosk where other beverage vendors would sell their drinks together with Starbucks. Starbucks would be allowed to continue selling their coffee only under the “Forbidden City” brand. No surprise that Starbucks did not accept the offer (Landsberg, 2007, p. C1). In July 2007, Starbucks decided to terminate the lease agreement with the management of the Forbidden City and close the small outlet.
Noteworthy is that during this process Starbucks adopted a low-profile public relations strategy to handle the activist pressure, by minimizing its media publicity, in which it reiterated that it respects the culture of the host country as well as public opinion. In his unofficial e-mail message to Rui (2007b), Jim Donald said Starbucks has “shown and continued to show [its] respect for the local history, culture and social customs, and [has] made serious efforts to fit in the environment of the Forbidden City” (also see Iritani, 2007, p. C1). In an interview conducted by The Seattle Times in April 2007, he also stressed that the Starbucks’ Forbidden City store was there for a combination of reasons: Forbidden City officials, the government officials and Starbucks. “We’re there because they asked us to come in, and we went there with all the respect for the culture and the heritage and history of the Forbidden City” ( Allison, 2007a, p. H1).
Upon the closedown of Starbucks’ Forbidden City outlet, a written statement from the Starbucks headquarters circulated in the media, saying “we fully respect the decision of the Forbidden City to transit to a new mode of concessions service to its museum visitors” (Allison, 2007b, p. E1). “We will not be successful if we do not respect the local culture. How can you be a part of their lives if you don’t respect their culture? There is no reason to believe this decision will affect other stores in China.” (Wang, President of Starbucks Great China, see Harris, 2007, p. C1).
From the point of view of critiquing its public relations strategy, Starbucks failed to perform a constant environmental scanning to create a shared identity between consumers and producers. Nor did it successfully communicate what it means to the Chinese within a changing media environment and in alignment with the strategic location of the Forbidden City. Starbucks was at a further disadvantage at a time when international sentiment towards the United States was sour, and when hostility can be easily put to action thanks to the Internet.