What comes to mind when you hear the name, John Cena? The theater of the WWE? Kellogg’s Fruity Pebbles cereal? The straight-to-DVD film “Scooby-Doo! Wrestlemania Mystery”? Whatever your answer, I bet the value of this article that your initial response would not be “kissing China’s ass”.
Last Tuesday, the super-star stated in no uncertain terms that he made an international blunder by accidentally making the sacrilegious statement that Taiwan was a “country” rather than a colony, or a territory, or a subservient satellite state like China surely likes to refer to Hong Kong as being. The reason? Cena was casually answering questions regarding the release of the film “Fast and Furious Nine” – a series that has nearly as many squeals as Square Enix’s Final Fantasy franchise – and said that Taiwan was one of the first countries that would be able to enjoy the movie upon its release.
Big mistake, apparently.
The state-sanctioned backlash arrived faster than the secret police to a Winne-the-Pooh post in Wuhan. Cena, being beholden to Hollywood – which is beholden to China – was forced to issue, in Mandarin, a cringe-ridden apology to the authoritarian state for his misguided insinuation that Taiwan was, in any way, free, independent, or anything other than a Chinese asset. For shame, Cena.
For clarification, Taiwan is, in fact, a self-governing nation. It is not, as Cena was, presumably, contractually obligated to retro-actively insinuate, a part of the “people’s republic”, much to the chagrin of Bejing and its “one-China policy. Which has, by the way, been about as effective as its “one-child policy”.
So it seems China has a new spokesman in the WWE. A man so owned by his managers and the whims of a few screeching bots on the Chinese intranet that he must rehearse a Mandarin ass-kiss in the mirror in the morning to keep his millions flowing in…AND HIS NAME IS JOHN CENA!!!