Beijing – 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 is foreign critics who need to lighten up.

The commercial for the “Qiaobi” brand – which has gone 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.

She sits on the lid while the man shrieks. Moments later an Asian man emerges in clean clothes, and the woman grins.

“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,” he added.

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YouTube screengrabs

The spokesman said a shorter version was broadcast in China, which did not feature the black actor, and he had no idea how the full-length clip ended up online.

The advertisement has provoked an uproar on US news websites, which cited it as an example of racist attitudes towards black people in China.

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

But it has 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.

China has historically experienced almost no migration by people of African descent, although the population has grown in recent years as China has risen to become the continent’s biggest trading partner.

Traditional attitudes prizing white skin in women have contributed to bias against dark-skinned people.

Read also: Racist detergent ad draws flak

MANILA – Ferdinand Marcos’s son threatened legal action Saturday to reverse his narrow defeat in recent Philippine elections, which analysts said had been the family of the late dictator’s best chance to regain the presidency.

An official canvass showed Friday that Ferdinand Marcos Jnr lost the vice presidential contest to neophyte rival Leni Robredo by just over 263,000 votes.

The younger Marcos, a sitting senator, had aimed for the family’s biggest political victory since its humiliating downfall in 1986 after a “People Power” uprising ended 20 years of the family’s rule.

But he insisted Saturday election he was potentially deprived of nearly four million votes through cheating and malfunctioning vote-counting machines, and was not ruling out an election protest.

“The search for Senator Marcos’s missing votes did not end with the canvassing,” his lawyer George Garcia said in a statement Saturday.

His legal team is gathering evidence in support of the planned appeal, the lawyer added.

The Marcos family had targeted the vice presidential post, elected separately from that of president, as a springboard for a potential presidential run for the 58-year-old son in 2022. 

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AFP, Reuters

“I think this election was arguably the best and probably last chance for the Marcoses to wrest back control of Malacanang (presidential palace),” Manila-based analyst Richard Javad Heydarian told AFP.

“It (the loss) would make it that much harder for the Marcoses to regain power through elections,” Ramon Casiple, executive director of the Institute for Economic and Political Reforms in Manila, told AFP.

Barring a reversal of the May 9 result, Marcos would have to wait for the 2019 mid-term elections to try and regain his senate seat, Casiple added.

The Marcos family fled to US exile after the bloodless revolution ended the dictator’s one-man rule, in which thousands of critics were thrown in prison and $10 billion was allegedly plundered from state coffers.

The patriarch died in exile in Hawaii in 1989.

Despite the loss, analysts are not ruling out his son’s potential presidential run at the end of president-elect Rodrigo Duterte’s term in 2022.

Heydarian and Louie Checa Montemar, a De La Salle development studies lecturer, both said the Marcos family would remain a major force, at least in its traditional regional bailiwick in the north.

“The only way now to banish any immediate future threat of a Marcos comeback would be to live up to the promise of raising the (economic prospects of the) marginalised,” Montemar told AFP.

This month the dictator’s widow, Imelda Marcos, swept to a third term in the House of Representatives representing Ilocos Norte province.

Her daughter, Imee Marcos, was also elected as Ilocos Norte governor for the third time. 

Manila to auction off Marcos family’s ill-gotten gains

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AFP, Reuters

SEOUL – Passengers of a Korean Air plane recalled the terrifying moment one of the aircraft’s twin engines caught fire as it was gaining speed for take-off at Tokyo’s Haneda airport.

All 302 passengers and 17 crew members were evacuated safely from the Korean Air Boeing 777 on Friday, escaping down the plane’s inflatable emergency evacuation slides onto the runway.

“As the plane was picking up speed to take off, there was a bang and I saw a plume of black smoke rising from the wing,” Keum Min-Woo, 34, told journalists after the passengers arrived in Seoul on an alternative flight late Friday.

Crew members calmly led passengers into safety, Keum said.

Another passenger Hwang Kyung-Tae, 59, said the plane screeched to a halt after the explosion.

“A minute passed and we were told to evacuate. If the plane had taken off several minutes earlier, we all would have died,” said Hwang.

Kim Byung-Jin, 47, had a bandage over his forehead from a cut he suffered when he bumped into another passenger as they were coming down an evacuation slide.

TV footage aired Friday showed the plane, which was bound for South Korea’s Gimpo International, surrounded by red fire trucks and with the area around its left wing doused in foam.

The South Korean transport ministry sent a team of investigators to Japan on Friday to assist the local authorities in determining the cause of the accident.

The plane had been in service for 15 years and the troubled engine was installed a year and a half ago, a Korean Air official said.

Panic as Korean Air plane caught fire

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Reuters, AFP