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A Chinese worker urinated into a Tsingtao beer tank after having an argument with a colleague, it has emerged.

The worker was filmed urinating into a tank used to store ingredients to make one of China's most popular beers last month.

The video then went viral on social media, gaining tens of millions of views.

The worker has since been detained, an official report said.

Officials from the city of Pingdu - where the factory is located - found that the worker in question was helping to unload malt containers from a truck at the time of the incident.

In a statement on the city's official Weibo page, they said the worker, surnamed Cui, got into an argument with a truck driver about moving the vehicle.

Mr Cui then climbed into the container, which had just been emptied, and urinated into it.

Mr Cui's actions were caught on camera by the driver, who then published the video on Douyin, China's version of TikTok.

In a statement published on the Chinese microblogging site Weibo, Tsingtao said the worker had been placed in administrative detention for property damage.

In China, administrative detention is a penalty that can be imposed by the police, acting with no judicial oversight, and usually involves being detained for between five to 15 days and sometimes comes with a warning and a fine.

Tsingtao added that the worker was not a direct employee of the brewery and worked for a company that provides outsourcing services to Tsingtao.

The brewer went on to say that they have adopted a number of measures to strengthen quality control and step up monitoring of employee behaviour to prevent such incidents in the future.

They also vowed to plug in what they called "loopholes in the management of raw material transportation," and said that the batches of malt involved in the incident have been sealed and will not enter production.