Xiaomi vice president Hugo Barra has been in India a lot lately, prepping for the Chinese cellphone and electronics company's big move to westward. He may have been there a bit too long, in fact: a recent photo that he posted on his Weibo account (and then quickly took down, but the damage was done) featured Barra standing in front of a map of Asia which, whoops, showed China and India's disputed border regions as belonging to India.
Think of this as the more obscure, Asian version of giving a presentation in Britain with "Islas Malvinas" instead of Falklands.
Chinese bloggers immediately took to the internet to criticize the image, as Quartz reports, saying things like "Xiaomi is unexpectedly forgetting its roots," and "Quick, throw Xiaomi away."
A quick China 101 reminder: many people, especially internet commenters, are extremely touchy about territorial disputes. The Diaoyu/Senkaku islands issue has brought China and Japan to the precipice more times than we care to recount, and those are empty rocks in the Pacific.
This time it's a 4,000 kilometer border region smack dab in the middle of Asia - it's a damn good thing China and India have a decent relationship (as opposed to the absolutely dire relationship between China and Japan) as this will likely become just a blip in Xiaomi's otherwise-successful opening in the India market. If the same thing had happened in Japan, Barra should have run for the hills.
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