Dell can't seem to get a break in the blogosphere, be it in China or the US. Dell's contretemps with uber-blogger Jeff Jarvis is already the stuff of blogging legend (just click on the "Dell" tag in his sidebar). Recently that saga came to an embarrassing climax when a young intern at Dell's PR company, GCI, left a scorchingly unprofessional comment on Jarvis' blog. Coming just as Dell was trying to use blogging to engage its customer base more constructively, this was poorly timed.

Dell's luck in China doesn't seem to be much better. The company has recently come afoul of the Chinese Internet's ferocious scandal-amplifying power, thanks to a relatively minor mistake. The situation has also highlighted how multinational companies in China are balanced at all times upon a precarious razor's edge of public sentiment.

Spot the scandal.

As nicely summarized in Bruce Einhorn's BusinessWeek article, the situation began last June when a man named Zhang Min bought a Dell notebook computer. When the notebook arrived, he discovered it had shipped with a T2300E Intel Core Duo processor rather than the T2300 part that the notebook had been advertised as including. What's the difference? The T2300 supports virtualization technology--the ability to simultaneously run more than one operating system--whereas the T2300E does not. (The difference is explained in more detail in this Digg thread.)

So what? Who other than professional geeks use virtualization at all, let alone in a notebook?

Well that, of course, is entirely beside the point. The point is that, however trivially, the notebook was advertised one way and arrived another. And what might have been one angry customer metamorphozed into a mob--and subsequent class action lawsuit--when Zhang used the Internet to locate and organize other disgruntled Chinese customers.

Sam Flemming, the founder of CIC Data, a company that tracks Chinese Internet sentiment for clients, and one of the most astute observers of the Internet in China, has posted a chronology of the situation on his blog (he's also quoted in Einhorn's story). Among other things, he noted that prominent Chinese IT Web site it168.com went so far as to establish a special forum section dedicated to the scandal. Flemming also dated the mainstream media arrival of "processor gate" (really) when the People's Daily got around to covering it in Chinese on June 30 (more than a month before English-language coverage).

What stands out in the forum comments is some of the nationalist sentiments. One commenter, after demanding an apology and excoriating Dell's response to the situation, wrote (loosely translated):

If Dell handled its American consumers in this way it would soon be bankrupt. Why are Chinese consumers unable to get the respect of foreigners? For us to do things this way is wrong. Although I'm not a direct victim, I am harmed enough by these companies that dismiss Chinese consumers. We must protect our rights! When the court begins its hearings, I can go testify! I will support every consumer! Other people don't have time, but I do. We must be respected. We must protect our rights!

Bluster? Probably. But it reveals a sentiment that often runs just below the surface in China: That foreign companies don't treat Chinese consumers the way they would treat consumers in their home countries. Jarvis might not entirely agree with that conclusion, but it is something that those of us who do PR for foreign companies encounter regularly in China. Often one of the first accusations leveled at a foreign company in a crisis is that it is giving Chinese consumers second-rate treatment. In effect, it's a charge of racism that seems to have its origins both in the nationalism that has been cultivated as a unifying ideology and in a post-colonial insecurity complex that invites quick suspicion of the motives of foreigners.

Those are sweeping generalizations, of course. And the Chinese do love many foreign brands. But it doesn't take much of a transgression for that love to transform into the fury of betrayal. The BusinessWeek article above recalls a few other similar situations. The crises aren't new. What's new is the window the Internet and Chinese blogosphere give us on those sentiments, and the speed with which they can now propagate.

As for Dell, BusinessWeek reports that it is taking a hard line on the substitution. It might be on sound legal ground. But in a country where its customers are well wired, affection for foreign brands is mercurial, and with its major domestic competitor Lenovo on the ascendant, it might not be making the best PR decision.