The Chinese embassy in Germany has urged Spreadshirt, a German online store for personalized apparel, to pull all T-shirts emblazoned with racist phrases from its virtual shelves and apologize to the Chinese people.
A series of T-shirts printed with “Save a dog, eat a Chinese” and “Save a shark, eat a Chinese” were spotted online, after netizens exposed the photos and deemed the words as racist on social networks earlier this month.
Spreadshirt screenshot
The Chinese embassy in Berlin has intervened in the case and negotiated with both the economic affairs authority of Germany and the company "to express our great displeasure." Officials demanded that all T-shirts with racist words be removed from the online store and that the company apologize to the Chinese people.
“I think that phrase is not reasonable and totally nonsense. If Chinese eat dog meat, how about cow, chicken and fish? The matter is not the Chinese people, the human in general is the problem. Humans are cruel, they hunt and eat animals without conscience,” Arian Latif commented on Facebook.
Spreadshirt screenshot
“Not all Chinese people eat dogs…”@VeraRBC noted via her Weibo account.
A verified Twitter user @yomyomf, who also posted videos about Asian American culture on YouTube, even launched a campaign to press for the removal of the T-shirts.
Twitter screenshot
Facing online condemnation, the company partially removed the T-shirts from sale. They are still available in some countries, however. According to its website, the two T-shirts were designed by Quentine1984 and Monigote respectively, both of whom are designers creating patterns for T-shirts and running shops on Spreadshirt.
Spreadshirt screenshot
Dog meat is not a fresh topic on social media. China’s Yulin Dog Meat Festival has caused controversy at home and overseas for years. In 2016, over 10 million Chinese people petitioned against the notorious festival in the southwest Chinese city of Yulin. In fact, 70 percent of Chinese have never eaten dog meat, showed a 2016 Humane Society International poll cited by the Huffington Post. There has also been a decline in the consumption of shark fins in the country, with some Chinese airlines banning the transportation of shark fins.
