JD.com, a leading Chinese e-commerce company, apologized on Tuesday for an "improper" advertisement promoting lingerie and featuring nurses on International Nurses Day, after coming in for criticism by medical professionals and netizens.
The advertisement was removed on Monday and the vendors and JD.com employees responsible were punished in line with the company's regulations, according to a statement published on the company's official Sina Weibo on Tuesday. The punishment was not clarified in the statement.
JD.com published the International Nurse Day-themed advertisement via its mobile phone app on Sunday, featuring pictures of models in racy nurse costumes and lingerie.
"A sweet day, caring for nurses," the advertisement read.
"We respect medical staff and apologize for the bad influence caused by the incident," the statement read, adding that the company seeks to better supervise its promotions.
The company claimed that the advertisement was for adult products sellers in its online mall and the employees who designed and published the promotion are "too young and not thoughtful enough," according to the Shanghai-based news portal thepaper.cn on Tuesday.
Doctors and nurses uploaded screen shots of the advertisement to social network platforms, condemning it as humiliating.
A surgeon from Zhejiang who worked in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and goes by the online username "Baiyishanmao" called for a boycott of JD.com in a post in Monday. His post had attracted more than 13,000 reposts as of press time. He also claimed that JD.com asked him to remove his post several times before the company's apology on Tuesday.
A nurse working in a hospital in Chaoyang district in Beijing, surnamed Lü, said that it is acceptable for the company to sell sexy lingerie but it should not use the name of the International Nurse Day.
"One already faces a lot of trouble in being a nurse in China, including a heavy workload and high-pressure doctor-patient relationships. Sexually suggestive advertisements like this show no respect for our hard work," Lü told the Global Times.
China has more than 3 million nurses, chinanews.com reported on Tuesday citing Li Bin, head of the National Health and Family Planning Commission. Very few nurses feel that society respects them, the New Express reported. The International Nurse Day, which falls on May 12, is celebrated to mark the contribution of nurses.
