“For the third consecutive day, the Chinese Communist Party’s official mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, has run articles criticizing Apple for its warranty policy in China and calling Apple’s defense of its customer-service practices arrogant,” Paul Mozur reports for The Wall Street Journal. “On China’s social media there has been no shortage of grumbles about its customer service and warranty policies.”
“But one unintended consequence of the vitriol emerged Wednesday after the financial magazine Caijing polled its Weibo microblog followers for their response to Wednesday’s article,” Mozur reports. “Playing on the title of the People’s Daily article — Smash Apple’s ‘Incomparable’ Arrogance — Caijing wrote on its account early Wednesday morning: ‘As a consumer, which arrogant company or companies do you want to smash? Please give specific names so that we can announce a top 10.'”
Mozur reports, “By Wednesday evening the poll had more than 600 comments, but Apple wasn’t a top mention. Instead, hundreds of users repeatedly named a handful of state-owned monopolies. Among them were China’s three largest oil companies, its three major telecom-service providers, and its four major banks, along with other government-run services like railways, electricity and water. Running just behind those companies was the People’s Daily and other state-run media.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: China might want to be wary of repeatedly biting the hand that feeds it.
Arguably, no single free company in the world has done more for China and Chinese workers more quickly than Apple Inc.
Caijing‘s poll results simply prove the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”
Related articles:
China slams Apple’s ‘empty and self-praising’ response to warranty complaints – March 26, 2013
What’s really behind China’s attacks on Apple and Android? – March 20, 2013
Chinese media attack on Apple exposed; backfires badly – March 19, 2013
Prominent Weibo users, Samsung spokesman paid to bash Apple – March 17, 2013