The essential social media review to know and understand the world top market. #FrenchinChina is a weekly column from FRED & FARID agency reviewing Chinese social networks to identify big social trends. It is the essential tool to understand and love today’s China.
Thanks to Zhuomin Qin, Feng Huang, Jalila Levesque, Jules Chaffiotte, Radouane Guissi, Ying Zhang, Aliou Maro, Louis Caudevilla, Dushan Karageorgevitch, Mathieu Jolivet, Jing Qian, Antoine Robin, Émilie Ohana, Zhejun Li, Vincent Arassus and Green United Music Asia for their participation to this chronic.
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Demotion of the Chinese national ping pong team coach
The HotTopic this week is the Chinese national Ping-Pong team, and more specifically their coach, Liu Guoliang.
Liu Guoliang is a former world ranked player who won the Olympic games and the world championships. He retired 14 years ago and became the coach of the Chinese men's team. He was promoted a few months ago and became national coach of all the women's and men's Ping-Pong teams.
The national Ping-Pong association issued a statement a few days ago to announce a restructuring of the national teams. The news was not taken well since this coach, who is a celebrity in China lost his job, and is no longer the head coach. He is demoted to the position of vice-president of the association... with 18 other people who have the same position as him!
The decision comes one day before the start of the world Ping-Pong championships in China. Naturally, people on social networks commented on the decision, with local players and coaches challenging it. 3 current world champions did not show up for their game in protest. Internet users asked in vain for the reasons for this decision, and are demanding that the association be more transparent, especially since the Chinese teams did not experience bad results with Liu Guoliang as coach.
Greentown under fire from the critics
The HotBrand this week, for bad reasons, is Greentown, a luxury building construction and Management Company. One of their towers burnt down and a family perished in the fire: a woman and her three children (the husband was on a business trip overseas).
The reasons for the fire caused a huge scandal, since it was the children’s nanny who caused the fire in order to steal some objects.
This of course shocked all Internet users. The police investigated and revealed some serious security problems in the Greentown buildings: a lack of security equipment, smoke detectors fire extinguishers, and even security personnel who misdirected the fire-fighters when they arrived and told them that everyone had already been evacuated.
Internet users are now asking companies to take responsibility and communicate on serious incidents like this one. The brand in question did not wish to comment.
The most effective life saver
The Hot Post this week is very interesting since it is the post of a complete stranger. The post on Weibo is, "The best way to save lives", and explains how her message is the best way to save lives when facing problems, and that people should come back to this post whenever they are feeling down to get a feeling of instant joy.
She then asked Internet users to post pictures showing joy and happiness. Little by little, more and more people got involved and she received 100,000 reposts and 50,000 comments with photos.
Most of these pictures were about of food, (foodporn), followed by comments of the type "you can’t die without having tasted this dish", "food is something essential in life".
Once again this is another amusing post that shows that the Chinese are very attached to food and that things can become viral in just a few hours!
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