Hema Supermarket, a fresh-food focused store chain which provides an online and offline shopping experience under Alibaba Group, made controversial waves online as the company was accused of discriminating against people born in Beijing.

The company apologized twice on Thursday night and Friday by posting two open letters on its official account on China’s Twitter-like Weibo, confirming the case was true and saying that staff mentioned in the case were from a third party, and that Hema does not hold regional discrimination during their recruitment process.   

On Thursday, a screenshot of a job seeker chatting to a human resources (HR) staff member who was suggesting that the company would reject applicants born in Beijing circulated on Chinese social media and received widespread criticism from netizens.

As can be seen from the screenshot, the HR member firstly asked the applicant which district in Beijing she lived in, and then asked whether she was a local or not. When the staff member knew she was from Beijing, he said: “We don’t want to recruit local people, sorry.” Then he added the reason: “We can’t afford to employ Beijing local people, since you are all so rich.”

The applicant then stressed that she needed to work, while the human resource staff member replied that this was a rule from the company.  

Hema supermarket reacted quickly, and apologized on Thursday night: “The staff who was allegedly involved in this case was from a third party, and we never mentioned we do not recruit local Beijing people.” Then on Friday, Hema supermarket again released an open letter on its official account, saying that they would end their cooperation with this third party and they had already contacted the applicant, hoping to have a chance to interview her. Also, they mentioned that over 22 percent of employees in Hema supermarket are from Beijing.

However, the company’s discrimination over the applicant from Beijing has already triggered outrage among Chinese netizens despite its public apology.

One netizen did not believe the response from Hema supermarket. The netizen also added that as a big company, such regional discrimination was unacceptable. 

Another netizen thought Hema supermarket was violating the ethics rules of big companies, and the company should “get out of Beijing”.

In fact, this is not the first case of regional discrimination in recruitment in Chinese Internet companies. Chinese video streaming giant iQiyi, also faced strong online backlash for its discrimination against an applicant from central China’s Henan Province in May, 2018. The company was said to have filtered the resume of an applicant from Henan Province.

Also, a recruitment advertisement released by Meituan, one of the largest food delivery platforms in China, was accused of discriminating against carriers of the hepatitis B virus (HBV) in June, 2018. In a job description for potential delivery men, the company said that applicants with “viral hepatitis” were not qualified to register on the platform.