There is a lot of Apple anger on Chinese social media this week. Two separate trending topics have ignited discussions. One revolves around Chinese actor Liu Jin, who smashed his iPhone 13 Pro Max in front of the Apple flagship store, while another one centers on an image of an Apple employee deemed inappropriate by Chinese netizens. But both viral trends have unfolded with surprisingly ‘juicy’ twists.

The Chinese actor Liu Jin (刘金) has become a big topic of discussion on Chinese social media this week for a remarkable statement he made in a 2-minute video that has gone viral.

The ‘statement video’ shows the actor angrily throwing his iPhone 13 Pro Max on the ground until it breaks, right in front of the Wangfujing Apple flagship store in Beijing, pledging he will never buy another Apple product again and accusing the company of being arrogant and overbearing after running into some repair issues.

Liu Jin is an actor who played in various productions, but he made his major breakthrough in 2015 when he played in the Chinese CCTV series Don’t Let me See (别让我看见) and in the successful comedy movie Goodbye Mr Loser (夏洛特烦恼).

This was not the only Apple incident going viral on Chinese social media this week. Another trending topic revolves around actor Liu Jin, who angrily smashed his iPhone 13 Pro Max in front of the Apple flagship store in Beijing. (Caps autogenerated, but you get the idea.) pic.twitter.com/MdPvnKqh1T

— Manya Koetse (@manyapan) September 19, 2023

In the video, recorded on September 17, Liu explains he just visited the Apple store to get his iPhone back after bringing it in for repair. Liu claimed that he bought his iPhone 13 Pro Max in August of 2022 through the official store and that, after a year, it had a hardware problem that needed to be fixed.

From the video by Liu.

According to Liu, the Apple store has now returned the iPhone to him without repairing it, saying that the phone was “modified without authoritization” by a third party, and that Liu should pay a 6,960 yuan ($950) fee to get it fixed.

Refusing to pay such an amount of money, and denying he got the phone through a third party, Liu then smashes the iPhone on the ground until it is broken, promising never to buy Apple again.

A hashtag related to the video was viewed a staggering 270 million times on Weibo, where it became a top trending topic (#演员刘金苹果店前怒摔iphone#).

 
Apple vs Huawei Rivalry
 

The actor’s recent actions have garnered considerable attention, primarily because they coincide with the escalating rivalry between Huawei and Apple. This rivalry has become a prominent topic of discussion in China recently, due to various things coming together at the same time.

Notably, Apple unveiled its iPhone 15 shortly after Huawei introduced its latest flagship, the Mate 60 Pro 5G. Noteworthy enough (and unlikely coincidentally),it was launched on the same date as the return of Huawei executive daughter Meng Wanzhou from Canada in 2021 (read here).

The official launch ceremony for Huawei’s new products is coming up on September 25, and people are hoping to find out more about the powerful Kirin 90000s chip that is being used by Huawei despite facing heavy US sanctions regarding Chinese access to crucial chip technology.

Simultaneously, reports emerged about alleged Chinese restrictions on iPhones within government and state agencies, resulting in a significant decline in Apple’s stock value. The Foreign Ministry later stated that that China has actually not issued any law, regulation, or policy document to ban the use of Apple phones.

All of these developments have reignited the ongoing tech giant competition in China, that is now about much more than smartphones alone and has come to symbolize geopolitical rivalry, encompassing themes of nationalism, anti-Western sentiments, and a growing sense of pride in products made in China.

 
Much Ado about Apple Employee Photo
 

As Liu’s phone-smashing video went viral, so did another controversy concerning an Apple customer service employee’s photo depicted on the official website of Apple.

A Chinese netizen pointed out that a photo of an Apple Watch Specialist representative on the Apple site may have been purposely “insulting China” (辱华) due to the appearance of the person in the photo.

Initially, many people thought the image was specifically used on the Chinese-language Apple site, and that it concerned a Chinese individual with a hairstyle that resembles a queue: a single long braid of hair that was traditionally worn by male subjects of China during the Qing.

Some people also thought the individual had a pockmark near the mouth and that their looks reinforces stereotypes surrounding Chinese appearances regarding eyes and forehead. The image therefore sparked wide-spread resistance among netizens who thought Apple deliberately and inappropriately used such an image to show Chinese individuals as being backward and unattractive.

online poll with nearly 198,000 likes on Weibo, asking if this photo is appropriate or not (the majority voted that the photo was not appropriate).

On the same day as Liu’s video first came out, September 17, the topic of the “braid-wearing customer service representative” went trending, and the hashtag of “how do you feel about the Apple China website image of the braided customer service representative” (#如何看苹果中国官网辫子客服形象#) has since received over 200 million views on Weibo.

Political commentator Hu Xijin (胡锡进) also responded to the issue, explaining how the Chinese people are particularly sensitive to issues related to “perceived insults to China by Westerners,” due to historical and cultural factors which are further amplified by current tensions in US-China and broader China-Western relations.

Hu therefore argues that “American and Western companies should be more careful and cautious when promoting their products and try to avoid using images and texts that could be misinterpreted by Chinese people.”¹

 
Who’s the Bad Apple?
 

But to what extent is criticism of Apple reasonable in both incidents?

In the case of the “braid-wearing customer service representative”, it soon triggered a response from Apple’s customer service (#苹果客服回应辫子客服形象#, hashtag with 180 million views) and led to more information.

It has since become evident that many assumptions about the image were unfounded. Contrary to the initial belief that the photo was exclusive to the Chinese page, it was also featured on Apple’s official websites in the United States, Japan, South Korea, and other countries.

Furthermore, it was revealed that the Apple employee in question is not of Chinese descent at all; she is a Native American female employee (also see Wen Hao’s post on this). Additionally, the perceived pockmark near her mouth was, in fact, a piercing.

In response to this, some people mocked Hu Xijin for how he responded to the controversy.

Photoshop meme mocking Hu Xijin.

But Liu’s video also turns out to be a bit different than the version of the story he presented.

The actor seemed to voice a popular public sentiment by taking a stand against Apple’s dominant position, that rivals that of China’s tech darling Huawei, by smashing an Apple smartphone in public.

But where is the proof that Liu actually bought his iPhone at an Apple store in 2022? Where is the receipt showing that his phone was indeed not coming from a third party that might have modified it?

To the dismay of many netizens, the actor refused to show the official store receipt of his Apple phone, and many people started to doubt if the actor might have just put on a show to gain attention at a critical moment in the market competition between Apple and Huawei.

Moreover, the actor’s story seemed even less credible when he tried to further explain it in a recent social media post.

Why?

As many netizens noted: the post he sent was actually sent from an iPhone.

By Manya Koetse

¹ “(..)一些国人在西方人“辱华”的问题上很敏感，有其真实的历史和文化原因。目前中美关系很紧张，中西关系也不如过去，美国和西方公司在做产品宣传时，多一些细心、谨慎，尽量不要选用有可能引发中国人误解的图文，这是他们开展跨文化交流时一份应有的素养和水平。”

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China’s central internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (国家互联网信息办公室), issued proposed measures relating to the development and use of AI chatbots and other AI tools in China to solicit feedback from the public during the initial legislative drafting process. People can send in their views and comments on the draft until May 10 of this year.

The current draft, published on April 11 (translation here), explicitly focuses on managing the “healthy development” of generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology, referring to any type of AI system capable of generating text, images, or other media in response to prompts. Over the past few months, ChatGPT in particular has become a widely used tool across the world to generate human-like responses to a wide range of questions and topics, but services such as Midjourney have also become popular to generate images.

In China, ChatGPT has also triggered a lot of online discussions on the ways in which it could be used, the effect it will have on the labor market, and issues related to privacy, copyright, and censorship in China (read ‘ChatGPT in China‘).

Although users in mainland China officially cannot sign up to use Open AI’s ChatGPT, many people do find ways to use the platform. Earlier this year, while discussions about ChatGPT were prevalent in Weibo’s trending lists, Chinese tech giants announced their own plans to develop similar ChatGPT-like services: Baidu has Erniebot, Alibaba is rolling out Tongyi Qianwen, while Bytedance, Tencent, and Netease are also working on their own LLM (Large Language Models) chatbots.

As 2023 is already the year of the chatbot, it is perhaps unsurprising for China’s internet authorities to lay out the rules surrounding generative AI technologies.

There are a total of 21 sections or articles listed in the document. Many of the proposed rules are quite general and are about AI-generated content and ChatGPT-like services having to be in line with China’s overall internet and privacy laws.

The draft suggests that AI-generated content should “reflect the core values of socialism” (“应当体现社会主义核心价值观”), should not undermine the state authority nor the socialist system, cannot be harmful to national unity or social cohesion, and it also may not promote terrorism, extremism, discrimination, violence, obscenities, nor spread false information (article 1).

AI-generated content should not just be true and accurate, it should also ensure that the legitimate interests of others are respected and prevent harm to their physical and mental well-being, as well as damage to their reputation, privacy, and intellectual property rights (article 4).

In accordance with the Cybersecurity Law of the People’s Republic of China (中华人民共和国网络安全法), users of generative AI models should also register under their real name (article 9).

These kinds of AI service providers also should take clear and transparent measures to prevent users from becoming overly dependent or addicted to AI-generated content (article 10).

On Weibo, many comments relating to the proposed measures are supportive of them, as netizens especially express concerns over copyright issues and the problems surrounding ‘deepfake’ and AI services allowing users to swop faces or generate images using people’s faces.

But other people also think that when it comes to AI generated content, the rules are vague and hard to control – and comply with. How could AI-generated content always be “true and accurate” if the prompt given by a user, for example, is to create a fairytale or other fictional content? And how does one actually measure an “addiction” to AI services if they are part of a person’s everyday workflow? Some commenters fear that the rules could be arbitrarily applied because they are so broad and general.

Then there are those who think that AI services like the American OpenAI’s ChatGPT are developing so rapidly that China is already falling behind and that, especially in the light of these rules, ChatGPT will be much stronger than Chinese equivalents.

By having to embody socialist values and stay in line with strict Cyberspace rules, chatbot services will have to stay aligned with China’s traditional media and publishers. Some Weibo commenters discuss how ChatGPT also has bias and alleged anti-China sentiments. “We’ll have to add the ‘Party spirit’ to our AI,” one person replies.

“It’s the survival of the fittest,” another commenter wrote: “If there is no innovation, they’ll be eliminated.”

For a full translation of the “Measures on the Administration of Generative Artificial Intelligence Services (Draft for Solicitation of Comments)”, check out China Law Translate here.

By Manya Koetse , with contributions by Miranda Barnes

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