Fox News host’s racial slur sparks online backlash in China

State broadcaster CCTV ran footage of US cable televsion channel Fox News on Monday showing a co-host making a racial slur against Chinese people, sparking an outcry on social media across China.

The footage ran on news channel CCTV-13 showing an excerpt from last Thursday’s episode of the Fox News programme The Five, where co-host Bob Beckel said: “Chinese are the single biggest threat to the national security of the US … we bring them over here and teach a bunch of Chinamen – er, Chinese people – how to do computers and then they go back to China and hack into us.”

Watch: Bob Beckel Drops A Racial Slur On Fox's 'The Five'

Within hours of CCTV reposting its programme on Weibo, it had been shared some 1,000 times and received more than 1,000 comments.

The story was also picked up by many news media outlets in China, including the Global Times, website 163.com and Wen Wei Po.

The news has also prompted some "Big Vs", or prominent microbloggers who have large number of followers on the popular social media platform Weibo, to comment on the report and repost the news.

Lin Zhibo, an editor of the Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily, said Beckel’s comment showed “that racial discrimination still exists among some ‘white men’.”

Deputy editor-in-chief Liang Jiawen of the International Herald Leader urged the public not to take it too seriously.

“The anchor is simply a big mouth,” he commented.

Beckel’s comments also triggered a backlash and calls for his resignation in the US.

“His [Beckel’s] comments have no place in America, and this is at least the second time he has used racial slurs,“ said Senator Ted Lieu of California in a statement over the weekend. “He must resign immediately”.