China Digital
Questions Surrounding Tragic Suicide of WePhone Founder Su Xiangmao
The tragic suicide of WePhone app founder Su Xiangmao has been dominating debates on Chinese social media.
“This is the first case in the history of the internet that an app closes down because its founder committed suicide, and that the reason for the suicide is a malicious wife who basically killed him,” ‘Brother News’ (新闻哥), a popular WeChat account, wrote on September 11.
The death of Beijing IT entrepreneur Su Xiangmao (苏享茂), aged 37, indeed has gotten everybody talking on Chinese social media over the past days, making headlines in hundreds of newspapers in mainland China and Taiwan.
It is the dramatic narrative behind the tragedy that has captured Chinese netizens – especially because a large part of this story takes place online.
Su’s suicide note, in which he says his 29-year-old ex-wife blackmailed him into paying her 10 million RMB (±1.5 million US$), was placed on Chinese social media right before his death with her personal details, along with an app notification which also sent users his ex-wife’s phone number.
A suicide note and online revenge
Su Xiangmao is known as the founder of the well-known WePhone software, a Skype-like app that allows users to make phone calls and send text messages to other WePhone users for free. Su Xiangmao jumped to his death from the balcony of his apartment in the early morning of September 7.
Well-known app WePhone.
Shortly before his death, Su published his suicide note on social media which revealed his grievance about the nasty divorce between him and his ex-wife Zhai Xinxin (翟欣欣).
Suicide note placed WePhone founder Su Xiangmao on social media.
See full translation of suicide note here
In his online suicide note, Su says that he had met Zhai through dating site Jiayuan.com and was only briefly married to her when she suddenly changed in behavior. The pair agreed to divorce, which is when the situation turned bitter, the note says.
Zhai allegedly blackmailed Su into paying her over a million dollars and leaving his home in Sanya to her. She intimidated and harassed him, and threatened to take his app offline through her uncle, an influential government official. The situation eventually left Su so exhausted that he decided to sign the divorce papers, losing all of his capital.
In the suicide note, Su says it is “vicious woman” Zhai who actually killed him. He ends the public note with her home address, phone number, and office address.
A notification sent to users of WePhone.
An app notification sent to all users of WePhone said: “The owner of this company is killed by his evil wife Zhai Xinxin [phone number]. WePhone is suspending its services!”
In search of the truth
In the aftermath of the suicide, online discussions continue to play an important role in the search for the truth about what happened to Su, and whether or not Zhai is legally guilty of extortion, with various friends or witnesses coming forward through online media.
Reports by netizens about the case are flooding social media under hashtags such as “Suicide of WePhone Founder”(#wephone创始人自杀). Generally, ex-wife Zhai is seen as the culprit who terrorized Su to such an extent that he eventually saw suicide as his only way out. Some say Zhai even is a professional scammer who received large sums of money from two previous marriages.
Family members of Su have confirmed to Chinese media that in the hours preceding Su’s suicide, he received numerous text messages from Zhai with insults and threats, saying he needed to give her money or else she would report his “illegal income” or “grey business” to the police and make sure he would end up in jail. Screenshots of these messages have been leaked online.
They also say that during the time they were married, Su spent no less than 13 million yuan (nearly 2M$) on Zhai in buying her a house and a Tesla car.
Su Xiangmao and ex-wife Zhai Xixi.
But there are also others, including former classmates of Zhai, who say Zhai was a top student at a prestigious Beijing university and that she is now an ambitious career woman who has no reason to scam others for money.
On September 12, Zhai’s uncle Liu Kejian also stated that he had no part in any situation involving Mr. Su, and that he had never even met him.
And to what extent can the dating site where Su and Zhai met, Jiayuan.com, be held accountable for this tragedy, some wonder. Jiayuan is an online dating platform meant for people who are looking to get married. If Zhai had indeed married twice before and is a professional scammer, then the site should have known this and should have deleted her from their database, according to some netizens’ views.
Jiayuan issued a statement regarding the case, saying the couple were its VIP members. The dating site also said it will assist in any police investigation into Su’s death.
“A second Ma Rong”
To some extent, the WePhone founder case resembles the 2016 divorce case of Wang Baoqiang and Ma Rong. Uncoincidentally, many netizens on Weibo refer to Su’s ex-wife as “a second Ma Rong.”
Ma Rong became the most-hated woman on Chinese social media in 2016 when she cheated on her husband Wang Baoqiang, a popular film star, and later sued him for defamation of character. Many called the young Ma Rong a ‘golddigger’ who only married Wang for his money.
Wang Baoqiang and Ma Rong.
Similar to the current WePhone case, Chinese social media played an important role as the marriage crisis between Wang and his wife unfolded within a matter of days after Wang placed a public message on Weibo accusing his wife of cheating with his agent and announcing the divorce.
The divorce papers that allegedly drove Su to commit suicide.
With every piece of news coming out on the Wang divorce drama, netizens jumped right on it to vent their opinion or to scold Ma Rong. As now, netizens turned into private detectives on the matter, inspecting old photos for clues that Ma Rong was indeed having an affair before or finding out her address and number and publishing them online, along with dozens of other official papers or screenshots serving as evidence in the case.
On September 12, a new website was set up by Chinese netizens (zhaixinxin.com), fully dedicated to the WePhone case and exposing the alleged lies by Zhai.
As with the Ma Rong story, it is probable that this case is not a “today’s newspaper is tomorrow’s fish and chip paper” case; with new facts popping up, the case will inescapably become the trending topic of the day again until netizens are satisfied with the answers they have found.
As one netizen (@猎头老王V) says: “I want to know how the country will deal with the Zhai Xixi case. We need answers so Su Xiangmao can rest in peace.”
By Manya Koetse
Follow @whatsonweibo
Thanks to contributors Sidney Wu & Miranda Barnes
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China Brands, Marketing & Consumers
BMW Ice Cream Gate: Three Reasons Why a MINI Story Became a Major Incident
There is more behind the BMW MINI ice cream incident than ice cream alone.
It is the noteworthy incident that made international headlines over the past week: a freebie marketing campaign by German automotive company BMW at the Shanghai Auto Show went horribly wrong.
The incident happened on April 20, 2023, at the Shanghai show’s MINI booth, where two Chinese female workers were giving out free ice cream from a local brand.
A video was posted on Chinese video platforms Bilibili and Douyin that showed staff at the booth refusing ice cream to a local visitor by stating that it had all been given away. However, when a foreign attendee approached, the staff suddenly had ice cream readily available for them.
The person who was filming, a Chinese man named Sun, then stepped up to the booth and ask for ice cream himself. The girls then suggested an app was needed for that, and that they had limited supplies. The video further showed that the only people actually enjoying the Luneurs brand ice cream were all foreigners.
The video footage soon went viral and sparked public outrage over discrimination against Chinese visitors of the show.
Screenshots from the video showed employees ignoring Chinese visitors and giving foreigners icecream (via Weibo).
BMW MINI tried to avert a marketing disaster by issuing an official apology via its social media channels in China on the same day, stating that they regretted that their sweet promotional campaign caused unhappiness “due to the lack of internal management and staff negligence.”
Many people, however, thought the apology was insufficient. “ChatGPT could write [a better apology] than this,” a typical comment said, and some even gave examples of ChatGPT writing a better apology.
“If I can speak English can I have some ice cream?”, another popular comment said. Others said they would never consider buying BMW again.
On April 21, BMW MINI released another statement on its Weibo account, in which they indicated that they had given away 600 ice creams in two days for people coming to the booth with vouchers distributed via the MINI app. At the booth, they had also set aside a few ice creams for their own “very hard-working colleagues” at the show. The statement said that the foreigners in the video were all BMW colleagues, wearing a badge.
They again apologized for the controversy and admitted they had mismanaged the situation, adding that they hope that people can have some tolerance and space for the two female workers who are young and were just newly employed.
The two female employees were reportedly dismissed and the ice cream promotional campaign was stopped (#宝马mini两名发冰淇淋女生已离职#). “You should replace your PR team,” some people suggested.
The controversy further intensified when news came out that, also on Thursday, one female live blogging at the BMW MINI booth was sent away and removed by security.
How could ice creams at an auto show trigger such heated nationwide discussions? There are multiple factors, including historical, societal, marketing, and online media dynamics, that contributed to the incident becoming such a significant issue.
1. Painful History: “No Dogs and Chinese Allowed”
One of the reasons why the BMW MINI story triggered such sharp criticism, accusations of racism, and emotional reactions, is because the incident stirs up collective memories of a sensitive period in history when Chinese faced humiliation and discrimination by the hands of foreign powers.
In discussions on the BMW MINI ice cream incident, the phrase “Chinese and Dogs Not Admitted” (“华人与狗不得入内”) came up again and again in online comments and memes.
The phrase is widely remembered in the context of a sign in front of Shanghai’s Huangpu Park that was closed to Chinese people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries during the International Settlement. The fact that the ice cream incident took place in Shanghai further reinforced the connection to this local history.
The “No Dogs and Chinese Allowed” sentence, by the way, was never actually displayed as an official sign at the park gate. But there was still a regulation at some point that Chinese visitors, except servants, were not allowed in the park. Bicycles and dogs were also not allowed in the park. Eventually, “No Dogs and Chinese Allowed” turned into a symbol of the nation’s “historical humiliation” (Bickers & Wasserstrom 1995: 446-449).
The sign was also featured in the Bruce Lee film Fist of Fury, and one relevant scene in the film was also shared on Weibo in light of the BMW MINI controversy (watch the scene here).
Because the (imagined) Huangpu sign has left such a lasting imprint on the collective memory of the Chinese public, it comes back up in online discussions whenever there are viral incidents in which Chinese people are made to feel unequal to foreigners in any way.
“So many years have passed, yet still fundamentally there is still [the idea] that foreigners are above us,” one commenter wrote. Others spoke of “BMW’s ‘Chinese and dogs not allowed’ attitude,” and one article called the BMW ice cream incident the 21st century version of “Chinese and dogs not allowed” (“宝马mini冰淇淋事件，是21世纪的“华人与狗不得入内“).
Multiple online discussions associate the BMW ice cream incident with the history of Chinese not being allowed to enter public parks during foreign occupation.
In 2018, Chinese bike-sharing service Ofo received massive criticism when it was exposed that they would give foreigners their deposits back while Chinese customers were ignored. One news headline about special tourist trains for Chinese tourists in Switzerland also triggered controversy in 2015.
When various foreign countries imposed Covid-related travel restrictions only for passengers from China in January of 2023, many netizens also responded with resentment and anger, partly fuelled by Chinese media reports describing the rules as a form of foreign revenge, discrimination against the Chinese, and political conspiracy.
2. Consumer Nationalism amd Western Brands
Another reason why the Shanghai Auto Show incident received so much attention relates to the specific dynamics of consumer nationalism in China and the BMW brand reputation.
One type of nationalism that has become especially prevalent on Chinese social media in recent years involves online anger Chinese netizens demonstrate toward Western brands. This goes hand in hand with a shift in consumer sentiments, a growing popularity of made-in-China brands along with a rise in cultural nationalism and changing international dynamics (read more).
In July of 2022, the French luxury fashion house Dior came under fire after netizens discovered one of its skirts resembled a Chinese traditional skirt known as mǎmiànqún (马面裙). The brand did not acknowledge that it had used the Chinese traditional design and online anger grew, with many netizens accusing Dior of cultural appropriation (read here).
Western brands faced heavy criticism in China in 2021 when a social media storm erupted over the Better Cotton Initiative (BCI) and its brand members for no longer sourcing from China’s Xinjiang region. The ‘Xinjiang cotton ban’ led to a major ‘Xinjiang cotton support’ campaign on Weibo, and a boycott for those brands siding with BCI (read here).
Image “Chinese fashion first: consumer nationalism and ‘China Chic’, by Ami/Goethe, see article here.
Condemnation and boycotting of Western brands also became prevalent during the Hong Kong protests in 2019, when Chinese social media users and state media condemned foreign brands for showing any signs of disregarding the One-China Policy. Asics, Calvin Klein, Coach, Givenchy, Versace, Swarovksi, and others were blamed for not respecting China’s sovereignty by listing Hong Kong and Taiwan as different countries on their websites or other products (read here).
In 2018, Italian fashion house D&G got caught up in a major controversy when its promo video campaign came under fire. In of their videos, a Chinese female model clumsily attempted to eat a large cannoli bread with chopsticks; a voice-over said that the cannoli might be “too big” for her. It was not received very well by many netizens on Chinese social media, where people called it “outdated and stereotypical,” “racist,” and “disrespectful.” The controversy snowballed out of control from there and became much worse after screenshots of racist comments attributed to fashion designer Stefano Gabba went viral (read here).
The recent BMW incident is thus part of a larger pattern of Western brands being accused of insulting and disrespecting Chinese people, while the popularity of Chinese (car) brands is rising. Earlier this month, What’s on Weibo wrote an article about how BMW often makes headlines in China in the context of horrific hit-and-run incidents and how the negative headlines are impacting BMW’s brand image in China.
BMW’s negative brand reputation in China exacerbates the impact of the ice cream incident, rather than alleviating it.
Although the brand has had a positive image for its high-quality and luxurious cars, it has also received a lot of unfavorable publicity, creating more negative associations – BMW drivers are generally seen as materialstic and flaunting their wealth. The nationwide attention for the ice cream incident and BMW MINI’s response to it has further damaged the brand’s reputation. The BMW stocks saw a price dip following the incident.
For some BMW car owners, the incident has also had negative consequences. According to various social media posts and photos, some BMW MINI owners saw their cars being scratched or vandalized over the past few days. At least one BMW MINI owner saw ice cream smeared over the front of their car.
3. The Snowball Effect of Social Media Storms
The incident involving BMW sparked a massive online controversy on Chinese social media, which quickly gained momentum. Initially triggered by one single video, it rapidly spiraled out of control as thousands of netizens joined in, expressing their views and creating their own videos and memes (also see this Twitter thread).
Some social media users also used old cartoons ridiculing preferential treatment for foreigners.
“Classic cartoon never goes out of date” (via Weibo/QCJ大王同学).
One meme suggested that “BMW” stands for: Bīngqílín (冰淇淋, Ice cream), Miǎnfèi (免费, Free), and Wàiguórén (外国人, Foreigners).
Besides general social media users, major brands also played a role in hyping up the incident. Other brands and companies used the firestorm to their advantage. Audi, for example, announced via social media that they would also be handing out ice cream only for Chinese people and other brands also started their own ice cream campaigns.
Chinese media outlets also played a major role in the incident as they kept reporting about the incident and promoted it on social media. By now, there are dozens of Weibo hashtags surrounding the incident and its aftermath, and the majority of them are initiated by Chinese media channels.
Chinese state media accounts also jabbed at BMW. CCTV aired an item showing that there is plenty of ice cream for all staff members on board of the Shandong PLA Navy aircraft carrier. Xinhua News even turned it into a hashtag, accompanied by a laughing emoji (#山东舰今天的冰淇淋是草莓味的#).
Screenshots from CCTV.
“We won’t give it to other countries,” some commenters joked: “Only Chinese can eat it.”
Meanwhile, some big KOL and influencer acounts also helped to attract more attention to the case by discussing it. Chinese political commentator Hu Xijin (@胡锡进), for example, also analyzed the incident. Although Hu called on netizens to be reasonable and have some understanding for the ordinary people who suddenly find themselves at the center of a social media storm, the mere fact that Hu brought the incident up multiple times to his 25 million Weibo followers perhaps did not exactly help in quieting things down.
For now, it seems that the BMW incident might keep fermenting for some time to come. While everyone is still talking about the ice cream incident, a second marketing faux-pas has already come up again as the next promotional freebie given away to visitors at the Shanghai Auto Show BMW booth is a wooden dog-shaped key hanger, giving people the option to engrave their name on it.
Many people also had an issue with this promo campaign: “So first they won’t give us ice cream, now they’re handing out dog tags with our name on it?”
Despite the controversy, many people still lined up at the BMW booth to get their freebies. The online discussions on the issue only seemed to bring more people to the car show. Turns out that bad publicity, after all, is still publicity.
Read more BMW-related articles here.
By Manya Koetse, with contributions by Miranda Barnes
Follow @whatsonweibo
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References
Bickers, Robert A., and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom. 1995. “Shanghai’s ‘Dogs and Chinese Not Admitted’ Sign: Legend, History and Contemporary Symbol.” The China Quarterly 142: pp. 444–66. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/655423. Accessed 24 Apr. 2023.
Image
Part of featured image by Mae Mu on Unsplash
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Kenny
September 15, 2017 at 1:00 am
http://tech.ifeng.com/a/20170911/44679039_0.shtml
the above news site (chinese) provide a few photos allegedly the receipt records (in chinese yuan) of his wife, pretty insane if you ask me, according to some other photos allegedly known as their chat history posted by Su Xiangmao on his own weibo/google+, he’s a pretty honest guy who lend her enormous financial support while the wife is just the definition of being venomous without a bottom line. According to the chat history, he notably killed himself because his stock has fallen 20% and wife still demands about $2million USD (compensation for spiritual damages of divorce and all the properties she bought in Sanya,Hainan Island) in a voice threatening to get him imprisoned if not complied. I heard the guy also had history of being fined by the government for operating WePhone under the gray zone of Chinese Law, and this is still the case before his suicide so that’s another allegation his wife can use to gain advantage against him. Meanwhile his entire self-declared net worth was just about $1,006,849 USD, Di Xinxin(wife) also forces him to comply with her long-term payment contract of 2 million with the threat of using her strong family relationship in the local police station (her uncle known as the head of public security court) to get him imprisoned…
So much pressure to take for an honest guy, a guy who was willing to let his wife spend millions of USD without a single concern, finally couldn’t take it all… depressing story.
eru
September 28, 2017 at 5:09 pm
He deserved that, that app is a fking defraud platform(been reported by many countries). I sympathize this woman cuz she’s being under cyber abused (which is Su had planned and incited) in China, a fking gross man chauvinist country.