From South China Morning Post. Story by Minnie Chan, AFP.

A Chinese detergent commercial showing a black man stuffed into a washing machine and transformed into a fair-skinned Asian provoked outrage this week, but the company behind the clip says it’s the foreign critics who need to lighten up.

The commercial, which went viral in the West, shows a black man whistling and winking at a young Chinese woman, who calls him over, puts a detergent packet into his mouth, and forces him headfirst into a washing machine. An Asian man emerges in clean clothes.

“We meant nothing but to promote the product, and we had never thought about the issue of racism,” a spokesman for the Leishang cosmetics company, which produces the detergent, told China’s Global Times. “The foreign media might be too sensitive about the ad.”

The ad provoked an uproar on U.S. news websites, which cited it as an example of racist attitudes in China towards black people.

“This ad is blatantly racist… it’s also a reminder that attitudes over race and skin color in China can be very bad,” said Vox.com

But it attracted little attention in its home country, with few comments on social media, and fewer than 2,000 views of the same ad on popular video-sharing site Youku.

However, some mainland users of Facebook said they didn’t like the ad because it hinted that “Africans are dirty and inferior to Chinese”, with some mockingly asking why the washing product couldn’t simply turn the “black man into a white guy?”

CNN reported that the ad had sparked an outcry in the southern city Guangzhou, which has at least 15,000 African residents. The local African community has complained of discrimination by local Chinese for years, but so far have not openly protested about it.

Until recent years, China had virtually no immigration by people of African descent. But that has changed in recent years as China has become Africa’s largest trading partner.

Traditional attitudes favoring light skin in women have contributed to bias against dark-skinned people.

Read more at  South China Morning Post.