Dolce & Gabbana's cancelled chopsticks advert shows us orientalism is finally being taken seriously as a form of racism

Dolce & Gabbana has recently faced backlash across China after the company posted a racist Instagram video that portrays a Chinese woman as a demeaning stereotype.

The two-minute video, which has since been deleted but posted anonymously onto Youtube, shows a Chinese model struggling with chopsticks to eat a pizza, pasta and a cannoli. It is laden with gaudy Chinese decorations in the background, an erhu playing loudly throughout, and the model feigns a child-like demeanour. Despite what some have claimed, the video is clearly not an homage to Chinese culture – but instead a racist depiction of the white West’s orientalist perception of Chinese culture.

Further worsening the situation, Stefano Gabbana defended the video in leaked Instagram private messages by referring to Chinese people as “ignorant dirty smelling mafia” and implying Chinese people eat dogs.

This video and the ensuing debate, elucidate greater issues regarding white neo-colonialist desires to excavate China’s wealth, degrading portrayals of east Asian women and a fundamental misunderstanding of what orientalism is.

Postcolonial theorist Edward Said coined the term orientalism, explaining it as “the way that the West perceives – and thereby defines – the East”. Jenn Fang, an Asian American race and feminist blogger behind the well-respected blog Reappropriate, wrote that the white West is “the norm, the standard, the centre, the fixed point around which the rest of the world orbits”. She added: “The East is, by contrast, the ‘Orient’ ... the exotic, the foreign, the Other defined specifically by its deviancy from the … western norm.”

Dolce & Gabbana’s video is therefore emblematic of this white western construction of what “Chinese culture” is to them – a hyper-sexualised Chinese woman against a background of exotic and kitschy imagery. In the video, the Chinese actress makes exaggerated motions, fumbles with her chopsticks in a childish manner and giggles while daintily covering her mouth. At one point, while she tries to eat a large cannoli with chopsticks, the male narrator suggestively asks in Chinese: “Is the cannoli too big for you?”

As is painfully exemplified in this video, east Asian women – and all women of colour – are infantilised sexual objects to be dissected and consumed by the white gaze. This racial fetishisation has violent consequences - Black, Latinx, Native, and Asian women are sexually assaulted at far higher rates than white women are.

On Friday, Dolce & Gabbana released an apology claiming to “respect” Chinese people, coincidently only after consumer backlash in China and major Chinese online shopping outlets removed Dolce & Gabbana’s products. Interestingly, this apology demonstrates another facet of this issue – neo-colonialism – which is the modern-day practice of white first world countries using their wealth and power to not only exert control over third world countries, but also to excavate wealth from these countries.

White western people and companies such as Dolce & Gabbana feign a respect for China, not because they believe Chinese people are actual human beings deserving of respect, but instead because they are trying to make money from the country’s people, while at the same time, happily reducing them to demeaning oriental caricatures to be gawked at.