In February 2021, China’s state broadcaster CCTV staged its Lunar New Year gala, watched by hundreds of millions. One act was an African song-and-dance number: performers in African-style dress, faces darkened with makeup. Three years earlier, the same gala had drawn worldwide condemnation for a blackface sketch. The makeup came back anyway.
State television, twice
The 2018 sketch celebrated the Mombasa–Nairobi railway, opened in Kenya the year before. A young Kenyan railway attendant asks her Chinese trainer to pose as her boyfriend to dodge an arranged marriage. Then her mother enters: Lou Naiming, a veteran Chinese actress, face and arms coloured brown, padded buttocks, a fruit basket on her head, trailed by a performer in a monkey costume. Her big line, beamed across China: “I love Chinese people! I love China!”
Chinese viewers were among the loudest critics: on Weibo they called the sketch racist, an embarrassment, a relic of the last century. China’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
The 2021 repeat brought sharper objections. “Is there any difference between Chinese people doing blackface and white people slanting their eyes to make fun of Asians?” one Weibo user asked, in Reuters’ reporting. The Black China Caucus, an advocacy group, offered the obvious fix: end the practice, and “hire some of thousands of Black people living in many parts of China.”
Washed clean
In May 2016, an ad for Qiaobi laundry detergent spread from Chinese television and cinemas to the world. A paint-splattered Black workman flirts with a young Chinese woman beside her washing machine. She beckons him closer, feeds him a detergent pod, and shoves him inside. The cycle ends; out climbs a pale, fair-skinned Chinese man, to her visible delight. BuzzFeed News called it the most racist ad of 2016.
The company’s apology, issued days later, expressed regret for the harm caused to African communities, blamed the “over-dramatization by the public opinion,” asked the media not to “over-analyze” the ad — and insisted Qiaobi strongly opposed and condemned racial discrimination.
Guangzhou: when it stopped being television
In April 2020, the story stopped being about images. Guangzhou holds China’s largest African community, some 14,000 African nationals by official count. As COVID-19 spread, authorities began forcibly testing Africans and ordering them into quarantine — including people who had already tested negative and had not travelled, Human Rights Watch documented. Landlords evicted African tenants; photographs of people sleeping on the street beside their luggage circled the globe. Hotels, shops and restaurants turned Africans away; one Guangzhou McDonald’s posted a sign stating that Black people were not allowed to enter, and the company later apologized.
Other foreign groups were not treated this way. Beijing denied discrimination, saying it “reject[s] differential treatment” and has “zero tolerance for discrimination,” while state media blamed Western outlets for provoking trouble between China and Africa. What moved the story was not Chinese media — it was African governments. The African ambassadors in Beijing wrote jointly to China’s foreign ministry demanding an end to “forceful testing, quarantine and other inhuman treatment meted out to Africans.” Nigeria, Uganda and Ghana summoned Chinese ambassadors to protest. Restrictions on Africans began easing in late April. Human Rights Watch recorded the longer background too: job ads in China that openly exclude heiren — Black people — or pay African applicants less for the same work.
Seoul’s faster apology
South Korea’s entry came with a quicker contrition. In March 2017, K-pop group Mamamoo screened a concert video parodying Bruno Mars’s “Uptown Funk,” its four members in darkened makeup. Fans abroad objected within hours; the agency apologized the next day, and the members followed in English: “We were extremely ignorant of blackface and did not understand the implications of our actions.” The segment was cut from subsequent performances.
Fair, lovely, renamed
South Asia’s hierarchy needs no makeup. It sells in tubes. Unilever’s Fair & Lovely cream launched in 1975; the Associated Press reported it earned the company more than $500 million a year in India alone. For 45 years its advertising told one story: lighten your skin, and the husband, the job and the spotlight follow. India’s matrimonial ads do the quieter work, listing brides and grooms as “fair” or “wheatish” next to height and education.
In June 2020, weeks into the American protest wave that followed George Floyd’s murder, Unilever announced it would strip the words “fair,” “white” and “light” from the brand, toward “a more inclusive vision of beauty.” In July, the cream returned as Glow & Lovely. The name changed; the product stayed on the shelves. Kavitha Emmanuel, who founded India’s Dark is Beautiful campaign, told AP the multinationals “did not initiate skin tone bias, but have capitalized on it.”
Analysis: older than the apology
None of this was copied from the United States. Japan has prized pale skin — bihaku, beauty-white — since at least the 11th century. Across much of Asia, dark skin marked the field labourer, light skin the person who could afford shade; in India, the caste order layered its own rankings over the same gradient. Colonial rule sharpened those hierarchies; global brands monetized them. The roots are homegrown. That is why the cycle keeps repeating: a broadcaster can weather a scandal, a company can rename a cream, and the ladder underneath — lighter means cleaner, richer, more marriageable — stands untouched.
It is also why these stories travel so badly. In the United States, Black Americans are a large public with megaphones of their own; an incident becomes a national argument in a day. In Guangzhou, the people sleeping on the street had no domestic platform at all. Their treatment became undeniable only when foreign governments turned it into a diplomatic incident. An AP-quoted marketing executive said the plain part out loud about the 2020 rebrands: the companies were watching opinion in the United States and Europe, where their shareholders live. The hierarchy lives in Asia. The microphone, mostly, does not.
Sources
- Human Rights Watch — “China: Covid-19 Discrimination Against Africans” (5 May 2020): https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/05/china-covid-19-discrimination-against-africans
- Reuters — “China New Year gala show sparks new racism controversy with black face performance” (12 February 2021, via The Hindu BusinessLine): https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/world/china-new-year-gala-show-sparks-new-racism-controversy-with-blackface-performance/article33818479.ece
- Reuters — “Blackface skit in China’s new year gala sparks racism accusations” (February 2018, via Metro US): https://www.metro.us/news/blackface-skit-chinas-new-year-gala-sparks-racism-accusations
- Mic — “This Wildly Racist Chinese Detergent Ad ‘Cleans’ a Black Man” (26 May 2016): https://www.mic.com/articles/144592/this-insanely-racist-chinese-detergent-ad-cleans-a-black-man
- PopCrush — “MAMAMOO Issue Apology After Blackface Concert Video Scandal” (March 2017): https://popcrush.com/mamamoo-apology-blackface-bruno-mars-concert-video-scandal/
- Associated Press — “Brand Equity: Is Marketing Makeover For ‘Whitening’ Cream Real Or Just Cosmetic?” (July 2020, via SHOOTonline): https://www.shootonline.com/article/brand-equity-marketing-makeover-whitening-cream-real-or-just-cosmetic/
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