Sharon Stone gaffe puts Dior on defensive in China

PARIS: Christian Dior, the French fashion brand, has become the latest global company to learn a hard lesson about the danger of offending Chinese sensitivities.

Facing the possibility of a boycott of its products, the luxury company said Thursday that it had dropped the American actress Sharon Stone from its advertising in China after she suggested last week that the recent earthquakes in Sichuan Province were karmic retribution for how Beijing treated Tibet.

"They had no choice" but to drop her from China, said Tom Bernardin, the chairman and chief executive of the advertising agency Leo Burnett Worldwide. "Her statement was ridiculous."

"Obviously, she crossed the line and they had no choice," he added.

The gaffe, which also provoked calls for boycotts of films in which Stone appears, brought sharp criticism from the Chinese media. Xinhua, the state-run news agency, referred to the actress in an editorial Thursday as "the public enemy of all mankind."

A spokesman for Dior in Paris, who asked not to be identified because of company policy, said that Dior's office in Shanghai had issued a statement Thursday in Chinese in which it announced that it would stop using Stone in its advertising in China. The statement recognized that Stone's comments had been "hurtful."

According to the spokesman in Paris, "We also said we shared the pain of the Chinese people and earthquake victims in Sichuan."

Stone also apologized in a statement that Dior made public, in which she said that she felt "deeply sorry and sad about hurting Chinese people," and that she would "wholly devote" herself to helping earthquake victims.

Dior had let the situation fester for a week before finally pulling the plug on Stone. The movie star said last week during an interview at the Cannes Film Festival: "I'm not happy about the way the Chinese are treating the Tibetans because I don't think anyone should be unkind to anyone else. And then the earthquake and all this stuff happened, and then I thought, is that karma? When you're not nice that the bad things happen to you?"

Dior is now considering the future of its global relationship with the Hollywood star.

With the Beijing Olympic Games only a few months away, and growth slowing in developed countries, luxury companies have been pouring resources into China to take advantage of the booming market.

"What comes through in this is the importance of the Chinese market to foreign brands," Bernardin said. "Being successful in China, like anywhere else, means being sensitive to local conditions."

Despite efforts to keep attention solely on their affairs, overseas companies have found that politics has a way of creeping into their Chinese business in unexpected ways. In April, the French retailer Carrefour was the target of protests after disturbances at the Olympic torch relay in Paris, when pro-Tibetan protesters lunged at a Chinese torch-bearer in a wheelchair. That image, quickly available on video-sharing Web sites, set off calls for a boycott of the company. Tempers calmed, but only after the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, dispatched a top aide to Beijing to soothe relations with Beijing.

In 2005, Japanese businesses across China were singled out for boycotts and demonstrations after Japan sought to introduce textbooks into junior high school that glossed over its militarism in World War II.

The blow-up over Stone's comments also serves as a reminder that companies, having hired celebrities to shill their wares, could end up with little control over their image if the star strays.