West still peddling same old images of Chinese otherness

Editor's note: The Dolce& Gabbana incident raises the question of how the West looks at China. Simply blaming such incidents on the West's "pride and prejudice" is not enough to understand how the stereotyped image of China was constructed, says Feng Zhou, a columnist, in a post published by Beijing News on its WeChat account:

Most of the West's visual records of China since the 19th century have portrayed the Chinese people as uncivilized others to serve as a foil to civilized Westerners. Dolce & Gabbana's controversial publicity video is only a new bottle holding the same old wine.

In the 19th century, portrait photography became spectacle photography to satisfy the West's fascination with the exotic East.