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    Half Tones

    Company Not Laughing Over Employee’s ‘Inappropriate’ Pokémon Pun

    Oct 10, 2019

     A staff member at a road race event company in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou issued a public apology Tuesday after he had posted a Pokémon-themed joke on social media about the Houston Rockets — the NBA franchise at the center of an escalating backlash in the country.

    The Rockets fell into hot water last week after their general manager, Daryl Morey, tweeted his support for the ongoing protests in Hong Kong last Friday — and before long the rest of the league had been dragged in as well, to the extent that virtually all NBA game broadcasts, celebrity endorsement deals, and commercial partnerships in China have been canceled.

    On Tuesday afternoon, Qiu Guanrong of Zhongti Marathon posted on his WeChat Moments social feed to profess his admiration for “Team Rocket” — which could be interpreted as referring to either the gang of bumbling baddies from the Pokémon series or the Texas basketball team. The message, addressed to “Jessie, James, and Meowth,” thanked the scheming trio — who always manage to fall just short of making good on their nefarious plots — for their dogged persistence in the face of adversity.

    Later that evening, Zhongti Marathon’s public WeChat account posted a letter in which Qiu purportedly apologized for his “inappropriate” message that had “hurt everyone’s feelings.” The post — which has been viewed over 100,000 times, the maximum number displayed by WeChat — also included an apology from the company’s president in the comments section below the post, though this was later deleted.

    Elsewhere on Chinese social media, bloggers have questioned whether the patriotic fervor surrounding the China-NBA clash might be going too far, with even state-run newspaper Global Times suggesting that companies completely severing ties with the NBA “doesn’t need to become some kind of trend.” (Image: 中体马拉松 on WeChat)