Lululemon, the Canadian apparel company, has apologised for an “inappropriate and inexcusable” social media post by an employee that caused an uproar in China and threatened to disrupt its rapidly expanding operations in the world’s second-largest economy.

The hashtag “Lululemon insults China” garnered hundreds of millions of views on Weibo, the country’s domestic alternative to Twitter, and some users called for a boycott after the brand’s artistic director posted a picture of a T-shirt saying “no thank you” to a takeaway box of “bat fried rice”.

The design was widely viewed by Chinese internet users as a racist reference to the origins of the global coronavirus pandemic in the city of Wuhan, capital of Hubei province.