Gap Apologizes for T-Shirt Chinese Communists Find Offensive
Though China, a major trading partner of the United States, is skeptically regarded as more of a friendly rival than a bitter enemy, it must be remembered that the nation is still ruled by a ruthless communist regime.
China’s totalitarian tendencies can be seen in how it’s leaned on Hollywood not to portray the nation poorly in movies. Moreover, China recently demanded that U.S.-based air carriers adopt the regime’s “Orwellian nonsense” with regard to language used to describe disputed territories like Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, according to Politico.
Now, China’s authoritarian bent has compelled clothing retail outlet Gap to issue an apology to the communist regime for having the gall to produce and sell T-shirts featuring a map of the nation that failed to include all of the disputed territories to which China lays claim, according to The Daily Caller News Foundation.
At issue was the fact that the map on the T-shirt failed to include the mountainous region of Tibet, the semi-autonomous breakaway island of Taiwan and the various islands in the South China Sea that the commies have claimed as their own.
American clothing retailer @Gap on Monday apologized for printing incomplete Chinese map on T-shirts for sales outside #China, said the brand respects China's sovereignty and territorial integrity pic.twitter.com/uHJoLnpmr6
— People's Daily, China (@PDChina) May 14, 2018
The “geographical mistake” caused an uproar on China’s version of Twitter, known as Weibo, which prompted Gap to pull the item in question from their stores in the country.
Incredibly, Reuters even noted that the picture of the offending shirt which caused the uproar in the first place was actually taken at a Gap store in Canada, not in China.
“We were informed the design of a Chinese map on a Gap T-shirt sold in some overseas markets was incorrect,” the retail outlet said Tuesday in an official statement. “The product has been withdrawn from the Chinese market and completely destroyed.”
“Gap Inc. respects the sovereignty and territorial integrity of China. We’ve learned that a Gap brand T-shirt sold in some overseas markets failed to reflect the correct map of China. We sincerely apologize for this unintentional error,” the statement added.
While it would appear that Gap “respects the sovereignty and integrity” of what China claims as its territory, the same cannot be said for the “sovereignty and integrity” of those territories that dispute the claimed ownership of China, such as Taiwan and Tibet.
Consider Taiwan, which is largely populated by nationalists who fled the communist regime imposed decades ago by Mao Tse Tung. Today, the Tawainese have asserted themselves as an independent and sovereign nation of their own.
Recall the uproar that ensued and the hurt feelings that needed soothing when then-president-elect Donald Trump actually called the president of Taiwan, an incident that was framed as an affront to China by that nation’s commie apologists in the liberal U.S. media.
Then there is Tibet, a small nation nestled among the Himalayan mountain range, a portion of which China has claimed as part of its own massive country.
Despite long-standing claims of independence by Tibet, the country has been ruthlessly subjugated against its will over the years by the harsh impositions of China.
This “mistake” and subsequent apology by Gap would be the equivalent of a clothing company in the late 1980s or early 1990s printing, selling and then withdrawing a shirt featuring a map of Soviet Russia that failed to include all of the other Soviet republics that were in the process of breaking away from the decades-long totalitarian grip of Moscow.
Essentially, a U.S.-based retailer that enjoys the fruits of capitalism just bowed to the whims of a communist regime that ruthlessly stifles any hint of free thought in those territories they oppress. Gap shouldn’t have apologized. Instead they should have printed more of the “offensive” shirts promoting freedom, independence and self-determination in the face of authoritarianism.
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