A Chinese company says it’s sorry for making a laundry detergent commercial condemned as a shockingly racist marketing ploy – but also faulted foreign media for drawing attention to its content.

“The ad was just a concept, with no malicious intent,” Shanghai Leishang Cosmetics Ltd. said in a message Sunday to The Globe and Mail.” We feel deeply sorry for the disturbance it has caused!”

The company had been the target of a public outcry for a commercial in which a Chinese girl pops a detergent packet into the mouth of a black man whose face and clothing are streaked with paint. She then grabs his neck and shoves him into a laundry machine, which swallows him whole.

Moment laters, he re-emerges as fresh-faced young Asian, whose dirt – and, apparently, racial characteristics – have been scrubbed clean.

The tagline on the video: “Change Begins With a Single Qiaobi Washing Bead.”

To many observers, it may as well have read: China, where racism sells.

“It’s really pathetic. It only goes to demonstrate that Chinese social values of duality and mutual respect are far below global standards for the 21st century,” said Hung Huang, a Chinese media commentator. “Somehow, a people so bent on Confucian moral supremacy has now become the moral delinquents of our age.”

David Moser, the academic director at an overseas studies program in Beijing “thought it had to be a joke” when he first saw it. “I just don’t know who thought this was a good idea.”

The answer: Shanghai Leishang, which shot the commercial earlier this year. It aired on television and in theatres, according to Shanghaiist, the online publication that brought its startling contents to light, calling it a “completely racist ad.”

It is the latest racial low-light in China.

For decades, there was “Darkie” brand toothpaste, sold by a Chinese company now owned by Colgate, which changed its name to “Darlie” in 1989.

That same year, thousands of Chinese people attacked African university students in Nanjing, screaming “Down with blacks!” and “Black devils!” Hundreds of the students fled to safety in embassies in Beijing.

In 2009, the appearance of a young singer with a Chinese mother and African-American father on a Chinese TV talent show provoked furious debate – and an outpouring of malicious commentary. “Ugh. Yellow people and black people mixed together is very gross,” one person wrote.

Like many black people living in China, technical writer Gerald Headd II regularly experiences discrimination.

Once, a merchant punched him on the back as he walked away from a pair of shoes he didn’t want. “She starts saying, ‘You’re dirty, you’re disgusting,’ ” he said.

So he was not surprised to see a black man depicted as unclean in the laundry commercial.

“It’s not really shocking any more, honestly. You kind of become numb to it,” he said.

Some Chinese viewers, however, questioned the outrage over the commercial.

“This is not so bad. ... Doesn’t feel like discrimination,” one person wrote on China’s Weibo social media platform. “It’s nothing but an advertising concept, why make such a fuss?” wrote another.

“Many Chinese people are seriously racist,” wrote Yang Rui, the host of English-language talk show Dialogue, which airs on state broadcaster CCTV.

saw on FB, it was lulz

growing up in HK (a british fucking colony), there was a brand of Toothpaste called "Darkie" but in the 80s they renamed it to "Darlie" because of it's extremely racist undertone...the chinese name remains the same it's still "black person" toothpaste

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darlie