COMMENT & ANALYSIS When I asked a Chinese friend last week if she was heading off to Carrefour on her regular weekend shopping excursion, she announced she was boycotting the French supermarket. “Carrefour supports Tibet independence,” she said. After a few minutes of trying to tell her how preposterous this was, I sensed from the gravely quizzical look on her face that she thought I was deluded, rather than the other way around.
I had not felt so dumbfounded since shortly after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade towers in New York, when a shopkeeper in Peshawar, Pakistan, a seemingly warm and hospitable man, offered his widely shared conviction that Jewish people had been tipped off to escape the buildings before the aircraft hit them. No amount of reasonable, rational argument could persuade him, or my Chinese friend, to see the events differently.
