China is waging war on Western names for buildings and places

CHINA’S SOUTHERNMOST province of Hainan is a tropical tourist-magnet of white-sand beaches, mountains and rainforests. Posh resorts line the island’s shore. It is also on the front lines of a culture war. In June Hainan’s government published a list of 53 places and buildings, including many hotels, with names that “worship foreign things and toady to foreign powers”. It said these names must be “cleaned up and rectified”—ie, changed.

Many of the offending names use Chinese characters that, put together, sound like foreign words: Kaisa for Caesar, for example (used in a hotel name), or Weiduoliya for Victoria (the name of a residential area in the capital, Haikou). Several of the buildings are hotels called Weiyena, or Vienna. They belong to the Jinjiang Group, a state-owned firm. The Vienna chain has publicly complained, saying its brand was legally registered in 2012.