Angry Chinese table tennis fans have demanded an apology from the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) after the country’s flag was mistakenly displayed on official merchandise.
A poster, T-shirt and hoodie – priced between US$35 and US$67 – commemorating China’s victories at the world table tennis championships in London last week presented a Chinese flag with six stars instead of five.
A later version appeared with the correct number of stars, but they were positioned incorrectly.
The merchandise has since been removed from the ITTF website.
Chinese fans reacted furiously to the blunder, with a WeChat article apologizing to the ITTF and Table Tennis England gaining more than 50,000 views.
The errors were also widely shared on the social media platform Weibo.
“Do you have the slightest respect for China and athletes?” one fan wrote, tagging ITTF and TTE and garnering more than 2,000 likes.
“Which country has a flag with six stars?” asked another.
Others directed their fury at the Chinese Table Tennis Association (CTTA), which has yet to publicly comment on the row.
“Does the CTTA not care about the most basic issues?” one Weibo user wrote.
Others also complained that the merchandise had left out China’s world number one Sun Yingsha, who won all her matches at the tournament, instead showing her teammate Wang Manyu.
“They don’t know what the five star flag looks like and they don’t know what ‘MVP’ means,” another user said.
