Since the global coffee brand entered China in 1999, more than 400 Starbucks coffee shops have opened in China as of 2006, including 64 in Beijing, the capital city. Starbucks launched an outlet inside Beijing's Forbidden City, known also as the Palace Museum,1 at the invitation of its management in 2000. This shop prospered until July 2007, when it had to close down under tremendous public pressure.
For those against the presence of this particular coffee shop, Starbucks represents low culture, an icon of Western “fast food” similar to McDonalds and KFC (Yang, 2007). It is not compatible with the “museum culture,” or with the refined taste of Chinese cultural legacy condensed in the Forbidden City. The museum reserves the highest achievements of the Chinese civilization over its long imperial history, and is regarded as the cultural symbol of China. This context cannot be farther away from the context where Starbucks has thrived. The clash was summarized by Lin (2007), in whose opinion “[t]he classic, unique silence in the Forbidden City was lost in the roaring tides of commercialization and the globalization driven by multi-national corporations.” For many, the Starbucks inside the Forbidden City is an affront to the awe-stricken palace.
To protect “national dignity” (Beijing News, 2007), thousands of Chinese Internet users participated in a Web-based campaign initiated by the personal blog of Chenggang Rui (hereafter, Rui), a well-known news anchor for the English-language programs at the state-run China Central Television (a.k.a., CCTV), the most authoritative Chinese news outlet, and eventually drove Starbucks away from the Forbidden City. This case raises several interesting questions: why was an individual's blog so powerful? What theoretical frameworks can be applied to analyze this international public relations campaign, which seems to combine both brand globalization and Internet-based communication? And how could strategic public relations help manage the tension between the “coffee culture,” or more accurately the “fast food culture,” and the “museum culture” that is intensified by the new media?
To answer these questions, the present study employs the “circuit of culture” model to understand the complex situations of international public relations by explicating the tension between Starbucks and the Forbidden City, as well as to demonstrate how the Chinese public collectively and actively de-constructed and re-constructed meanings for the Starbucks shop inside the Forbidden City within an Internet-facilitated communication environment and its impact on global branding.