- An ethnic Chinese model is attacked online by Chinese nationalist netziens because she has "slanted eyes"
- The Chinese model appeared in a 2019 Chinese add for a Chinese online snacks retailer called "Three squirrels"
- A top Chinese photographer was attacked for featuring a Chinese model with narrow eyes. The photograph was for French luxury brand Dior.
- Mercedes and Gucci have both come under fire from Chinese netziens for featuring Chinese models with narrow eyes.
- Chinese netziens think the add agencies should feature fair and round eye models because that is the Chinese beauty standard.
- The Chinese nationalists think that featuring Chinese women with "slanted" or narrow eyes is promoting Western racism.
And here is the model for Chinese brand "Three Squirrels".
And here is teh Dior add featuring a different model that also faced the wrath of Chinese nationalists.
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The Chinese model had this to say
"Do I not deserve to be Chinese just because I have small eyes?"
That is what Chinese model Cai Niangniang wrote in a recent impassioned social media post, after old pictures of her went viral for all the wrong reasons.
For several days she had been attacked online for being "deliberately offensive" and "unpatriotic", over a series of advertisements she had appeared in for Chinese snack brand Three Squirrels.
Her apparent crime? Having narrow eyes.
Some social media users were so outraged that the company eventually removed the ads online, and apologised for making people "feel uncomfortable" over them.
But Ms Cai said that she did not know what she had done to get cyber-bullied, noting that she was "just doing my job" as a model.
"My looks were given to me by my parents," the 28-year-old wrote on the Twitter-like platform Weibo.
"Have I insulted China the day I was born just because of how I look?"
https://www.yahoo.com/news/china-why-think-small-eyes-002856237.html
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Amid a growing sense of online nationalism and anti-West sentiment in China, some have seized upon these advertisements as examples of racism towards Chinese people. By featuring models with narrow eyes, critics say these companies are perpetuating Western stereotypes of Chinese faces.
Many asked why these adverts did not feature the kind of models more commonly seen in Chinese advertisements who have fair skin and large round eyes, which are typically considered ideal beauty features in China.
A recent editorial by state news outlet China Daily highlighted how "for too long, Western criteria of beauty, and Western tastes and likes and dislikes dominated aesthetics". That included depicting Asian women in adverts as having narrow eyes, it said.
"The West no longer has an absolute say over everything," the opinion piece read.
"The Chinese people do not need to follow their standards on what constitutes beauty and what kinds of women are considered beautiful."
As a Chinese brand, Three Squirrels "should have known about the sensitivity of Chinese consumers to how they are portrayed in advertisements,", it added.
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This is some epic level cognitive dissonance here. The Chinese nationalists think that models with features that are typically associated with East Asia is promoting Western racism and instead want models with round eyes, even though people perceive round eyes to be the Western ideal of beauty. So the Chinese netziens are actually promoting a beauty standard that the West is accused of prefering.
