Attacks in the spas in Atlanta shed light on anti-Asian hate crimes around the world

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And it’s not just an American problem. From the UK to Australia, reports of anti-East and anti-Southeast Asian hate crimes in Western countries have increased since the pandemic broke out last year. At least eleven people of East and Southeast Asian descent spoke to CNN with reported racist and xenophobic incidents, such as people running away from them on trains, verbal abuse, and even physical abuse.

Over the past year, some Western politicians have repeatedly highlighted China’s connection to the Covid-19 outbreak, as well as raising rhetoric against the Asian superpower. Within this environment, advocates say that people of East Asian and Southeast Asian descent have increasingly become the target of racism.

Peng Wang, a lecturer at Southampton University in southern England, says he was physically assaulted one cold afternoon by a group of four men while jogging near his home.

The men shouted racist remarks to the 37-year-old, including “Chinese virus,” he told CNN. They got out of the car after Wang yelled back at them, punched him in the face, and kicked him to the ground. He sustained minor facial injuries and a nosebleed, but the trauma from the event made him concerned about leaving his home, his future in the UK and the safety of his young son, he told CNN.

Peng Wang, a college professor, was attacked in late February while jogging in Southampton, southern England.

“What they did was not polite, it was not supposed to happen in today’s society. They just treated me like an animal,” he said. According to two statements to CNN, police have since arrested two men on suspicion of racist violence.

When Donald Trump released the [US] President, and he said the ‘China virus’ was absolutely wrong, ”added Wang.

Polls conducted in June found that three quarters of people of Chinese ethnicity in the UK had experienced being called a racist insult.
During an October debate on racism against the Chinese and East Asian communities in parliament, Scottish National Party legislator David Linden said some of his constituents “ described the attacks on them, in which restaurants and takeaways were destroyed and boycotted and victims were beaten, spat. coughed up in the street and even scolded and accused of the corona virus pandemic. “

On the edge

As the pandemic made its way across Europe, activists in Spain and France began to notice a problem. Campaigns, such as #NoSoyUnVirus (#IAmNotAVirus), have been set up to raise awareness of the increase in violence against Asians.

In March 2020, an American man of Chinese descent, Thomas Siu, said he had been violently attacked in Spain’s capital, Madrid, after two men shouted racist comments about the coronavirus at him.

Siu, who was a student at the time, said he was verbally assaulted ten times between January and March last year. This time he stopped taking it and instead yelled back at his verbal abusers.

But the men did not stop. They walked up to him and knocked him unconscious, the 30-year-old told CNN, adding that he was in the hospital for a week. “I’ve always known there’s racism here and people don’t really recognize it,” Siu told CNN.
Celebrities were in favor of #StopAsianHate well before the Atlanta filming

Susana Ye, a 29-year-old Spanish journalist who made a documentary about the country’s Chinese diaspora in 2019, told CNN that violence against Asians in Spain has normalized and underreported by the Spanish press.

“For many it is not an important issue because many journalists are not alive [in] or know members of the community, “she said.” They have no anti-racist perspective and they know nothing about communities other than their own. ”

She says there is a problem with underreporting of hate crimes in Spain due to language barriers, fears among some of being deported and the older generation’s tendency to remain silent about incidents.

“I think people choose violence, verbal abuse, and physical abuse because they don’t expect us to respond at all,” she said. “They are used to us keeping ourselves low.”

Spanish comic artist Quan Zhou Wu, who lives in Madrid, agrees. “The attack in Atlanta has not been on the front pages of the media in Spain, it is super, super small news, we are invisible,” she told CNN.

A 2019 report from the Spanish government found that 2.9% of Asian nationals life in the country were victims of hate crimes. But while such crimes are recorded against Spanish nationals, the numbers are not broken down by ethnicity. The government has yet to release the figures for 2020.

In France, campaigners say the pandemic has made racism even worse for the Asian community. “Since last year, racism has become more apparent. It’s people who say they don’t like Asians or they don’t like China,” said Sun-Lay Tan, a spokesperson for Security for All, an organization representing more than 40 people. represents. Asian associations in France.

‘Make it better for future generations’

The campaign group estimates that there was a hate crime against an Asian every two days in the Paris area alone in 2019. While they don’t have data for 2020, Tan spoke of a number of anecdotes, including an account of someone dislocating his shoulder the night after French President Emmanuel Macron announced a new lockdown in October.

He said his first experience with xenophobia in France was last February, when a man changed places on the metro after Tan sat down.

“Our parents faced racism, but they accepted it because they wanted to integrate into the country,” he told CNN. “We are the second generation of immigrants in France, it is our responsibility to speak up” and make France “better for the next generation,” he said.

Berlin-based filmmaker Popo Fan, born in China’s Jiangsu province, said things were bad at the start of the pandemic, when he was too scared to go outside or use public transportation.

“I was spat at the beginning of the pandemic, I was sworn in on the Berlin metro line,” Fan said. “But I have a complicated feeling about it because the person who attacked me was a migrant himself. He was drunk and probably had a lower socioeconomic background … I feel that German society has not given him enough resources or education about it. racial diversity and public health. He has no access to that information. “

He says the blame is on the German authorities, who “don’t seem to care enough about racial issues”.

He said he had been targeted on the street several times before the outbreak. “I had a person yelling at me” back to China. “The police told me there was nothing they could do,” said Fan.

This is not only a European problem. A March report from the Australian think tank, the Lowy Institute, found that more than a third of Sino-Australians feel they have been treated differently or less favorably in the past year because of their ancestry. And 18% say they have been physically threatened or attacked because of their Chinese ancestry.

Be merged

Back in the UK, Singaporean student Kay Leong told CNN that a person who sold roses on the street started yelling at her “coronavirus, coronavirus” after she refused to buy flowers.

“I’m not from China, but I imagine all Asians get confused when it comes to this kind of racism,” she told CNN. I also noticed more grinning. But I will say, this kind of racism or harassment is not new to me, I’ve been dealing with it since coming to London in 2016 for my undergrad [studies]

Kate Ng, a 28-year-old Malaysian-Chinese journalist with the British newspaper The Independent, told CNN that while the attacks in the US seem to be much more pervasive, the incidents reported in the UK have caused a chill among Southeastern Asians.

‘I only want to go out when there are more people around. But I wonder, ‘Am I more likely to be verbally abused or attacked? “That fear is very palpable,” she said.

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