Bulgari apologizes for Taiwan listing amid Chinese social media uproar

By Oscar Holland, CNN

(CNN) — Bulgari has apologized for listing Taiwan and China separately on some of its websites, after Chinese social media users accused the luxury jeweler of treating the island as an independent country.

The outcry, which was later fueled by Chinese state media, saw netizens threatening to boycott the Italian brand’s products as screenshots of the websites’ dropdown menus circulated online.

In a statement published to the Twitter-like platform Weibo on Tuesday, Bulgari said it “respects China’s position on sovereignty and territorial integrity, as always and unswervingly.” The apology blamed “management negligence” for having “mislabeled” locations on its websites.

The statement did little to quell the outrage, with two related hashtags — one of which has now racked up 800 million views — appearing in Weibo’s top 10 trending topics. “Don’t make such low-level mistakes next time,” read one comment responding directly to Bulgari’s post. “Taiwan is an inalienable part of China.”

State-owned tabloid Global Times claimed that Bulgari’s apology was “not accepted by many in China.” The Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily meanwhile questioned why the brand had not published similar statements to its English-language accounts on Twitter and Instagram.

“Is this apology ‘exclusively’ for mainland China?” the newspaper’s Weibo account asked, describing the brand’s response as “full of the desire to survive.” Many users’ responses to the post concurred, with one reading: “Not posting it on the internet outside China shows that they only care about money and don’t realize their mistakes.”

Social media users also called on the company’s celebrity ambassadors — including actors Liu Yifei and Shu Qi, who is from Taiwan, and the model Liu Wen — to issue statements or sever ties with the brand.

The ruling Communist Party has long claimed Taiwan as its own territory, despite having never controlled the self-governing democracy. Bulgari has 18 boutiques on the island, according to company’s Chinese-language website, which lists the outlets alongside its locations in Hong Kong, Macao and mainland China.

China’s luxury consumers are of growing importance to Bulgari and its parent company, LVMH, which earned 26% of its revenue from Asian markets in 2022. Speaking to state-owned newspaper China Daily in 2021, then-president of Bulgari’s Greater China division, Kolia Neveux, said that the jeweler’s “focus on the Chinese market and the deep understanding of Chinese cultural identity” had helped it “obtain extraordinary growth in China in the past 20 years.”

The company is not the first to be accused of undermining China’s territorial claims. In 2019, Versace apologized for a T-shirt that appeared to list Hong Kong and Macao as countries, rather than cities. Coach and the LVMH-owned label Givenchy followed suit the next day, after social media users discovered similar designs that also neglected to identify Hong Kong as part of China, while also implying Taiwan’s independence.

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CNN’s Candice Zhu contributed to this report.