Swiss watch company Swatch apologized on Saturday for running an advertisement that featured a model using his fingers to pull his eyes back, making a “slanted eyes” gesture, which Chinese social media users found offensive, even though the model was himself Asian.
“We have taken note of the recent concerns regarding the portrayal of a model in images for the Swatch ESSENTIALS collection,” the company said in posts on Instagram and China’s heavily censored Weibo social media platform on Saturday.
“We treat this matter with the utmost importance and have immediately removed all related materials worldwide. We sincerely apologize for any distress or misunderstanding this may have caused,” Swatch said.
The ad caused an uproar in China after some big social media accounts criticized it last week. Some Chinese commentators were still calling for a Swatch boycott even after the company apologized and pulled the ad.
“You can apologise, but I will not forgive,” said a Weibo user quoted by the BBC on Sunday.
“They make money from us and still dare to discriminate against Chinese people. We would be spineless if we don’t boycott it out of China,” said another.
“You purposely use an Asian doing the slanted eye pose for your latest collection and calling it misunderstanding? I mean if only I was born yesterday,” said a flabbergasted Chinese social media post cited by Fox News.
“Calling it a ‘misunderstanding’ is just wild. You really should fire everyone in your marketing team,” another angry commentator said.
Swatch sales in China have declined as the Chinese economy weakened, but the combined markets of China, Hong Kong, and Macau still accounted for about 27 percent of the company’s sales in recent years. Swatch posted an 11-percent decline in sales for the first half of 2025, almost entirely due to weak demand in China.
China’s state-run Global Times on Tuesday lectured Swatch for underestimating the “cultural awareness of Chinese consumers.”
“Although Swatch hastily deleted the image from its official website and issued an apology, the selective correction and the downplayed wording in its English statement exposed the company’s arrogance and lack of cultural understanding in markets like China,” the Global Times wrote, before launching into an extended digression about the “historical context and power structure” behind the “slanted eyes” finger gesture.
“The makeup and gestures of the model in this incident are by no means simple artistic expression, but rather a contemporary reproduction of colonial discourse,” the Chinese Communist paper asserted, although it seems likely that no one at Swatch or its advertising agency was thinking along those lines.
The company probably thought it was emphasizing the fun and frolic of its colorful watches with a model making a goofy face. The Global Times could be no more charitable than speculating that Swatch, like other “Western brands,” was trying to use “controversy as a low-cost exposure tactic,” but Chinese consumers were too sophisticated to take the bait.
Somehow, the Global Times leaped from this assertion to a geopolitical and psychoanalytic dissertation on the insecurity of Western capitalists over the rise of China, under which theory Swatch was trying to assert Western “psychological superiority” through “cultural suppression.”
“This incident is a warning to Western companies hoping to share in China’s consumption upgrade: the cultural dignity of the Chinese people is not to be provoked, and the prosperity of the consumer market must be built on mutual respect,” the article concluded.
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