When former US president Donald Trump called Covid-19 the “Chinese virus”, he was deliberately playing with fire. In a climate of growing tension between Washington and Beijing, the chance to blame the Chinese Communist Party for unleashing a deadly pandemic was not to be missed. Sadly, but predictably, the United States has since seen a wave of anti-Asian abuse, with the Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center recording just under 4,000 anti-Asian racist incidents between March 2020 and February 2021, believed to be a fraction of the total. After the tragic killing of eight women, six of them Asian, by a white man in March of this year, the US has finally embarked on an urgent conversation about how to tackle the problem.
What about here in Britain? UK police data suggests a similarly urgent issue in this country, with a rise of 300 per cent in hate crimes towards Chinese, east and south-east Asians in the first quarter of 2020, compared with the same period in 2019 and 2018. People of Chinese ethnicity make up roughly 0.7 per cent of the British population. However, as in the US, people with heritage from across Asia, the largest continent in the world, are being mistaken for Chinese and attacked on this basis.
This country is having a long-overdue conversation on race, following the Black Lives Matter protests last year, the fall-out of the Oprah Winfrey interview with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and the publication of a government-commissioned review in April, whose key finding that there was “no evidence of systemic or institutional racism” in the UK has drawn fierce criticism. Anti-Asian racism needs to be part of this conversation.
Britain has a long history of discrimination against the Chinese, which began after Chinese immigrants began to settle around the docks in Liverpool and the Limehouse area of east London in the late 19th century. These first Chinatowns were characterised as exotic and dangerous, with Chinese immigrants accused and attacked due to the perception that they forced down labour prices and brought crime to the area. A particular act of betrayal came in the aftermath of the Second World War, when the Home Office deported “undesirable” Chinese seamen, after they had served in the British merchant navy. Many of them had families in the UK.
There have been calls for an official apology for these historic wrongs. But there is also an urgent need to protect Chinese and Asian populations today, at this sensitive moment when the country is opening up, but fear and resentment over Covid-19 and the fallout of the virus are still high. In the US, plans have been put forward to increase accessibility to hate crime data, introduce new training for local police and review how to best crack down on violent anti-Asian acts. As we leave the pandemic behind, we need similar action in the UK, if anti-Asian racism is not to become part of the “new normal”.
This piece is a preview from the Witness section of New Humanist summer 2021. Subscribe today.
