A regional branch of China Unicom, one of the nation’s biggest telecom companies, was forced to apologize after using an anti-Communist slogan from the civil war in the 1930s in a marketing campaign.

The branch in Shandong province on Saturday posted a photo commemorating the 84th anniversary of the Xi’an Incident, a political crisis that led to a pause in fighting between the Communist and Nationalist armies, allowing them to focus on defeating the Japanese invaders.

“Remember our revolutionary forebears, energize our patriotic fervor,” read the illustration posted on the branch’s official Weibo account. “Remember our mission, remember our history.”

However, the poster also cited the Kuomintang slogan “Stabilize the country before resisting foreign aggression” — coined by Chiang Kai-shek to reflect his belief that the Kuomintang should defeat communist forces in China before confronting the Japanese.

The post was a “typical example of historical nihilism,” said Shen Yi, a politics professor at Fudan University in Shanghai.

The China Unicom Shandong branch promptly deleted the poster and apologized.

In 1931, the Republic of China government led by Chiang rejected calls to fight Japanese forces, and instead focused on eradicating their political rivals. Chiang only changed his mind after two of his generals staged a coup in 1936 and held him captive for two weeks.

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