French football star Kylian Mbappé found himself at the centre of a controversy on Tuesday (October 27), prompting China to suspend State TV broadcasts of Spanish league games and major Chinese brands to drop him from sponsorship deals.

In what was intended as a light-hearted video, the Real Madrid player was discussing memes featuring him, saying his favourite one superimposed his face onto that of a “Chinese dictator”, referring to Mao Zedong. The Chinese State’s response, though, was anything but light-hearted.

One State media editorial said, “No country can tolerate attacks on its founding fathers”, invoking the “historical memory and cultural sensibilities of the Chinese public”. Yet the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) own relationship with Mao’s legacy is complicated.

In fact, it was almost exactly 50 years ago that Mao’s brainchild, a decade of unprecedented chaos in modern China officially called the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”, ended.…