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Comment by mytailorisrich | Hacker News Reader

What's happened to Versace happens once a year to a company. It happened to D&G at the end of last year.

It's not necessarily triggered by the government. Chinese are very patriotic, if not nationalistic, and the power of social media does the rest.

In this case Versace have only themselves to blame: T-shirts "Milan-Italy", "London-UK", etc. then "Hong Kong-Hong Kong" especially at this time, was incredibly stupid though probably not malicious.

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> It's not necessarily triggered by the government. Chinese are very patriotic, if not nationalistic, and the power of social media does the rest.

I can relate.

I have seen people who are very critical of the government but at the same time circulate anti-West materials all the time.

Oh, it's even worse than that, they even have "Macau-Macao". Not only did they not know that Macau is a part of China, but they could not even spell "Macao" properly!

From this, I would not even say it's due to stupidity, but more incompetence. If you are in a business and not know about one of your biggest markets, then you are doing something very very wrong!

How did they misspell Macau/Macao? I lived there for 7 years, and at first I thought Macao was the Portuguese spelling due to the -ao ending. It's more complicated than that when you start to research the two spellings.

The Portuguese spelling is Macau. Macao is English, and maybe other languages.

For Portuguese you are probavly confusing it with the -ão ending. The tilde makes a difference.

For example: - pão / pau - mão / mau

Believe me I went through that explanation, and a few others in deep conversation with my Portuguese and Macanese friends as well as with a Matteo Ricci scholar. It seems there was an old Portuguese spelling Macao, and there is Macáu with the accent also from eighteenth or nineteenth century Portuguese. In Cantonese it is called Àomén

TIL. Thanks for that.

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