May 29, 2016
BEIJING — A Chinese detergent company has apologized for a commercial that drew claims of racism, but the company accused the international media of fueling the controversy by being "too sensitive."
May 29, 2016
BEIJING — A Chinese detergent company has apologized for a commercial that drew claims of racism, but the company accused the international media of fueling the controversy by being "too sensitive."
The ad for Qiaobi laundry detergent, which has drawn millions of views on YouTube, shows a black man pushed into a washing machine and emerging later as a light-skinned Asian man.
Shanghai-based Qiaobi said it had “no intention of discriminating against people of color” by making the commercial. “The color of one's skin is not the standard by which we should judge each other. We strongly oppose and condemn racial discrimination,” the company said late Saturday on it official Weibo account, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter.
The company earlier suggested there was nothing wrong with the 50-second ad and blamed foreign media for being “too sensitive” about it.
“We meant nothing but to promote the product, and we had never thought about the issue of racism,” a spokesman told the Global Times on Friday.
China has faced similar scrutiny in recent months. In December, a promotional poster for the blockbuster movie Star Wars: The Force Awakens drew fire after it was edited to marginalize the character played by John Boyega, who is black.
In the detergent commercial, a black painter with white paint smudges on his face enters the room and whistles at a Chinese woman who's doing some laundry.
She beckons him forward and he approaches for what seems will result in a kiss, but the woman puts a green detergent pod in his mouth and shoves his head, then his body into the washing machine. He later pops out a "washed" Asian.
The company said in the statement that it strongly opposes racism and had stopped airing the ad.
"We regret that our advertisement led to controversy and have no intention of shirking our responsibility," the statement said. “The advertisement and the surrounding controversy have hurt those of African descent, and because of this we would like to apologize."
The company still seems to blame part of the outcry on foreign media that wrote about the ad, listing some organizations by name and saying those reports had “generated” public interest.
“We hope that Chinese brands will continue to find success in international markets,” the company added.
The statement added that the company hopes Internet users and the media "will not continue to over-analyze the situation."
The English-language Chinese news site Shanghaiist said the ad had been available on the Chinese messaging app WeChat, and was shown on TV and played in movie theaters this month in China.
Until foreign media began noticing the ad, few in China had commented on it. The What's On Weibo site, which tracks the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, noted that the commercial became the No. 1 topic on the online forum Reddit with the heading, “Seriously China?”
Many have taken to social media to say they find the ad “stupid” or “offensive.”
“This type of advertising is too low. I will not buy this product,” said one Weibo user going by the name Fenglinchunyu.
“This ad is inhuman, I hope they will ban it,” said another Weibo user, Ke Jiayan.
Social media also referred to a nine-year-old Italian detergent commercial in which a gaunt Italian man is turned into a buff black man. That commercial's music is used in the Chinese TV commercial.
On Shanghaiist, writer Christopher Ivan suggested that a Chinese culture valuing light skin probably played a role in the ad's creation.
"Many Chinese people have a well-established phobia of dark skin, which unfortunately also breeds racist attitudes towards people of African descent," he said, adding that some people view blacks as "dirty" solely because of their skin color.
Courtesy: USA Today
