Racist T-shirts condemned by Chinese embassy in Germany

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