Chinese media star gives Starbucks a jolt
He is 29 years old, a suave world traveler who speaks nearly flawless, American-accented English and enjoys the occasional coffee from Starbucks. As a television news anchor, he has an audience estimated at 100 million and has interviewed hundreds of global business and political leaders, among them Bill Clinton and former General Electric Co. Chairman Jack Welch.
From now on, though, Rui Chenggang will be known as the man who drove the baristas out of the Forbidden City.
Seven months ago, Rui, an anchor for the state-run China Central Television, complained on his blog that the presence of a Starbucks had “undermined the Forbidden City’s solemnity and trampled over Chinese culture.”
It was as if he had opened the valve on an espresso machine. Reaction from Chinese readers poured forth, hissing and full of steam. Many people, it seemed, were offended by the presence of a shop selling half-caf mocha frapuccinos in the most hallowed spot in China, where 24 emperors had ruled in almost unimaginable grandeur for nearly 500 years. By the next day, Rui says, the item had been read by half a million people and generated “thousands, if not tens of thousands,” of e-mail responses.
On Friday, under pressure from the government, the Seattle-based company closed its small shop inside the Forbidden City, having rejected an offer to continue selling Starbucks coffee under the Forbidden City brand.
“It is not our custom to have stores that have any other name,” Eden Woon, Starbucks vice president for Greater China, was quoted by the Beijing Youth Daily as saying.
Rui, a rising media star who is used to having people listen to him, was not surprised by his clout.
“It was well within my expectations,” he said in an interview Monday, sipping orange juice, not coffee, in the lounge of a hotel near his studios. “It was just a matter of when and a matter of how.”
In the last few months, Rui has been called many things, not all of them kind. A Shanghai newspaper mocked him as “Lord Rui,” saying his “instigative ranting” was neither fair nor “gentlemanly.” He was branded an ultranationalist, an opponent of free trade and a man out of step with the modern world.
None of that, he insists, is true. He just didn’t think Starbucks belonged in the Forbidden City.
“I’m not against Starbucks,” he said. “I’ve never stopped drinking Starbucks’ coffee. It’s just that I’ve never ordered Starbucks coffee from that particular branch.”
With more than 240 stories in mainland China, including 57 in Beijing, Starbucks is a marker for affluence, much as it once was in the United States, ubiquitous in chic shopping malls and a sign of gentrification in up-and-coming neighborhoods. One of its most famous stores, in a redeveloped district of Shanghai, is scarcely 100 yards from the site, now a museum, where the Chinese Communist Party was formed -- by tea drinkers, no less -- in 1921.
Of course, the Forbidden City protest was about more than just Starbucks. Rui said that when Starbucks opened its Forbidden City branch in 2000, “China was a different country. Seven years ago, China was not even a member of the World Trade Organization. China was trying to show the world that we could be part of the world economic community.”
At that time, he said, “what was in the minds of most people in China was how to get rich and famous. It was a country that had been depressed economically for a long time. Our cultural heritage wasn’t a big priority.”
In some ways, it still isn’t. Rui complained about how many Chinese cities are bulldozing much of their past in a mad dash toward modernity, to the point that many are becoming bland and nearly indistinguishable. Still, he said, the country might be reaching a pivot point when people begin to ask, “How do we preserve our identity? What defines China?”
His answer, of course, is the Forbidden City -- that, as much as anything, defines China’s cultural heritage.
“I was having lunch with an Indian person today, and I said, ‘Would you Indians allow a Starbucks to be inside the Taj Mahal?’ And he said, ‘No, of course not, we would never let that happen.’ ”
“The Forbidden City,” Rui added, “is not an airport.”
Outside the Forbidden City on Monday, thick throngs of tourists, most of them Chinese visitors from outside Beijing, were coming and going and posing for requisite photos in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, which is dominated by the famous, billboard-sized painting of Mao Tse-tung. Not everyone had heard of the Starbucks controversy, and among those who had, there was no obvious consensus.
“China and foreign countries have lots of communication and trade, so it’s not a big thing to have a foreign coffee shop in the Forbidden City,” said Qiao Yun, 22, who just moved to Beijing from Heilongjiang province. “We don’t need to close it.”
But Zhou Hui, 23, a high school physics teacher from Anhui province, said he was glad the shop was closed. “The Forbidden City is something very Chinese, and we should have things that are Chinese and traditional there,” he said. Waving his hand toward the street, he said, “It’s OK if it’s somewhere out here, outside the Forbidden City. But not inside.”
As for Rui, he believes he might have started something bigger.
“I think the removal of the Starbucks from the Forbidden City is just the beginning,” he said, a wake-up call “to make us stop and think and say, ‘OK, now we’ve made money. What’s next?’ ”
mitchell.landsberg
@latimes.com
