Illustration: Peter C.Espina/GT

Ever since the release of the now-infamous Qiaobi commercial - a Chinese ad that featured a black man being literally white-washed by laundry detergent - a debate has been raging both inside China and out as to what this says about the country's problems with racism.

Though Qiaobi was initially unapologetic, claiming that it meant to be provocative, it later apologized in a statement that condemned racial discrimination - before essentially telling everyone to stop getting their panties in a twist: "We hope that the media won't overanalyze this."

This, in a nutshell, seems to be how much of China viewed the incident - as a bit of insensitive humor that was misbranded as racism by an overly politically correct Western world, eager to impose its own racist history and sensitivities on China.

The argument is, essentially, that China has historically existed outside the context of systemic black oppression (along with all the racist stereotypes that have gone with it), and that gaffes like this one are less evidence of racial prejudice as they are of China's collective ignorance of what is, essentially, a Western problem. In other words, if we can borrow a psychological term, the West is "projecting."

While it's true that the Western world, and especially the US, has a shameful history of racism against blacks that continues into the present, there exists a key difference: We have, and continue to, reckon with our racism. China, by contrast, blindly insists (as in an opinion piece published in the Global Times on June 1) that "racism is not a common social problem in China."

That is, frankly, disingenuous bunk. As any foreigner who's spent time in China can tell you, racism against black people is both rampant and open. There was, for instance, the taxi driver who told me he doesn't like driving black people because they're "dirty;" Chinese friends who've said they would never date a black person ("but not because I'm racist"); the kids at my husband's school who laugh at the mere mention of dark skin or Africa.

And if you talk with black expats living here, you'll hear worse: a never-ending string of insults that range from stares out in public to jobs that were denied, from slights at work to landlords who refuse black tenants, from police harassment to love lost.

The fact is that racism is not a bounded phenomenon, dependent entirely on historical context - it's a set of ideas and beliefs about a group of people that corresponds to real-world oppression. The notion that a racially naïve China spontaneously came up with the very worldwide stereotypes that have oppressed black people for centuries is absurd; the culture actively hands these ideas down from generation to generation, creating prejudices whose corollary exists in real-world discrimination against blacks socially, culturally and economically.

In the end, regardless of how China chooses to contextualize its own attitudes toward people with dark skin, it must recognize that in a modern, global age, regressive attitudes toward race that draw on offensive racial stereotypes - regardless of where they originated - cannot be tolerated. Qiaobi's commercial tapped into wide-held sentiments about black people in China that reflect real-world discrimination with real-world effects. Refusing to acknowledge that is papering over the problem, and not only allows racist attitudes to continue on unchecked, but implicitly supports them by failing to condemn them.

The author is an editor of the Global Times Metro Beijing. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn