Arianna Quan, 23, was crowned the winner of the 2016 Miss Michigan competition on June 18. (Photo/Xinhua)
Disputes over the looks of Miss Michigan, the only Chinese-American woman to compete in the Miss America 2017 pageant, have escalated after China's largest nationwide State-owned bookstore called the contestant ugly and attacked her for allegedly betraying her country.
The Xinhua Bookstore in Beijing reposted several pictures of Miss Michigan on its official Sina Weibo account on July 29, saying, "Looking like that, you can only be exported to the U.S. Do not come back if you have dignity, otherwise you will scare children, and people will call the police if they see you on the bus. Since you have accepted the foe as your father, please call yourself traitor on this [application form]."
The post sparked outrage from many Chinese Net users. The Beijing Youth Daily reported Thursday that the bookstore's account had been hacked and that the company is investigating the case, citing information from the bookstores' management.
The Global Times has learned that the account no longer appeared on Sina Weibo on Thursday afternoon.
Arianna Quan, 23, was crowned the winner of the 2016 Miss Michigan competition on June 18, news site mlive.com reported.
A resident of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, Quan was born in Beijing, where she lived for the first six years of her life before moving to the Detroit metropolitan area and becoming a naturalized US citizen at the age of 14.
She speaks two languages and is the only woman in her Transportation Design class at Detroit's College for Creative Studies, where she has studied for the last two years. Quan also impressed the judges in a flashy yellow swimsuit and a unique, layered evening gown.
But instead of celebrating her landmark achievement, many Chinese people slammed her online for not being pretty enough and mocked American standards of beauty. Some people even accused Quan of ruining the reputation of Chinese people, thus making her seem even more beautiful in Americans' eyes.
"It reflects the huge differences in standards of beauty between the East and the West. However, we should pay more attention to people's confidence and talents instead of viciously attacking their looks," Wang Shi, president of the Chinese Culture Promotion Society, told the Global Times.
Mark Zuckerberg, whose wife Priscilla Chan has also been criticized by Chinese netizens for not being pretty, has recently responded to the attacks, saying that physical beauty will diminish with age while inner beauty will grow with the years.
