China’s travel booking platform ctrip.com has removed the Evergreen Laurel Hotel in Shanghai from its listings after the chain’s Paris venue banned the Chinese national flag during the 2024 Summer Olympics, sparking an Internet furor.
The story — which had garnered 110 million views on Sina Weibo — had since been removed from the platform’s list of most popular posts.
On Monday, a Chinese influencer known as Instructor Zhang (張教官) accused the Evergreen Laurel Hotel in Paris of refusing his request for the Chinese flag to be displayed at the venue in a video uploaded to TikTok.
Photo: Screen grab from the Web site of the Evergreen Laurel Hotel in Paris
A person purported to be a Chinese chef employed at the hotel was shown in the video as saying that the hotel’s Taiwanese general manager had ordered the staff to remove a Chinese flag previously flown there.
The video went viral on Chinese social media, with Sina Weibo briefly listing “Evergreen Laurel Hotel’s Taiwanese manager cut down a red five-starred flag” as its second-most-popular search term.
Guoshi Zhitongche (國是直通車), an outlet affiliated with China’s state-owned Xinhua news agency, shared the video on Weibo, noting that Taiwan and China are listed as the same territory in the hotel’s booking system for the Asia region.
Beijing officials and state media gave no comments regarding the controversy in a rare display of reticence.
When asked, Evergreen Hotels, which manages the hotels, said the franchise was sorry for failing to provide the best possible experience to its customers, adding that it is taking steps to ensure all patrons would be properly accommodated.
The franchise issued a separate statement in China admitting that its handling of the situation was “less than perfect” and that the corporation “does not wish to see the incident negatively impact the goodwill between the peoples across the strait.”
Commenting on condition of anonymity, a hotel employee in Shanghai said ctrip.com has apparently blocked key terms relating to the establishment, preventing potential customers from accessing its listing on the travel booking site.
The hotel’s official Web site remains available to the public, they said.
The Central News Agency has independently verified these claims.
GREAT POWER COMPETITION: Beijing views its military cooperation with Russia as a means to push back against the joint power of the US and its allies, an expert said A recent Sino-Russian joint air patrol conducted over the waters off Alaska was designed to counter the US military in the Pacific and demonstrated improved interoperability between Beijing’s and Moscow’s forces, a national security expert said. National Defense University associate professor Chen Yu-chen (陳育正) made the comment in an article published on Wednesday on the Web site of the Journal of the Chinese Communist Studies Institute. China and Russia sent four strategic bombers to patrol the waters of the northern Pacific and Bering Strait near Alaska in late June, one month after the two nations sent a combined flotilla of four warships
THE TOUR: Pope Francis has gone on a 12-day visit to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore. He was also invited to Taiwan The government yesterday welcomed Pope Francis to the Asia-Pacific region and said it would continue extending an invitation for him to visit Taiwan. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs made the remarks as Pope Francis began a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific on Monday. He is to travel about 33,000km by air to visit Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore, and would arrive back in Rome on Friday next week. It would be the longest and most challenging trip of Francis’ 11-year papacy. The 87-year-old has had health issues over the past few years and now uses a wheelchair. The ministry said
‘LEADERS’: The report highlighted C.C. Wei’s management at TSMC, Lisa Su’s decisionmaking at AMD and the ‘rock star’ status of Nvidia’s Huang Time magazine on Thursday announced its list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence (AI), which included Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) chairman and chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) and AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su (蘇姿丰). The list is divided into four categories: Leaders, Innovators, Shapers and Thinkers. Wei and Huang were named in the Leaders category. Other notable figures in the Leaders category included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Su was listed in the Innovators category. Time highlighted Wei’s
EVERYONE’S ISSUE: Kim said that during a visit to Taiwan, she asked what would happen if China attacked, and was told that the global economy would shut down Taiwan is critical to the global economy, and its defense is a “here and now” issue, US Representative Young Kim said during a roundtable talk on Taiwan-US relations on Friday. Kim, who serves on the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, held a roundtable talk titled “Global Ties, Local Impact: Why Taiwan Matters for California,” at Santiago Canyon College in Orange County, California. “Despite its small size and long distance from us, Taiwan’s cultural and economic importance is felt across our communities,” Kim said during her opening remarks. Stanford University researcher and lecturer Lanhee Chen (陳仁宜), lawyer Lin Ching-chi