Chinese netizens went berserk after Beijing Walmart listed a product’s country of origin as Taiwan
Taiwan News
Date: 2018/03/19
By: Keoni Everington, Taiwan News, Staff Writer
TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — On Friday (March 19), Chinese netizens got in an uproar over
Sign reads “Product country of origin: Taiwan.” (Weibo image)
photos and video of sign at a Beijing Walmart which marked a display of products as being produced in the country of Taiwan, rather than a part of China, which the Chinese government has lately been pressuring corporations say.
On Friday, a Chinese user of Weibo (the Chinese version of Twitter) posted a video taken from inside the Dongguan branch of a Walmart in Beijing’s Changping District which showed imported products being displayed at a discounted price. Products imported from the UK and South Korea were labeled as “place of origin UK” and “place of origin South Korea,” but for a group of products imported from Taiwan, the sign read, “country of origin Taiwan.”
After the video surfaced, the Chinese media site Observer Network (观察者网) called an employee at the Beijing Walmart about their decision to label the products as coming from the country of Taiwan, instead of “province” or “area” as is the required practice in China, she indignantly replied, “Its (the product’s) country of origin is Taiwan, therefore it must be labeled as Taiwan, it can’t be false.” [FULL STORY]
