Coronavirus spreads anti-Chinese feeling in Southeast Asia, but the prejudice goes back centuries

The emergence of the novel coronavirus in China triggered a rise in anti-Chinese hate speech in Indonesia and discrimination elsewhere in the region

Such prejudice has a long history, and the Covid-19 pandemic is causing economic upheaval, which in the past has led to violence against Chinese communities

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Rioting mobs take their anger out on the portrait of Indonesia’s once wealthiest man, Liem Sioe Liong, after they looted and burned his house in Jakarta in 1998. Ethnic Chinese like Lim have controlled much of Indonesia’s commerce, which made them a target for violent acts. Photo: Reuters

Published: 7:15am, 29 Apr 2020Updated: 6:14pm, 30 Apr 2020

The coronavirus pandemic has triggered a wave of anti-Chinese sentiment throughout Southeast Asia, with some businesses refusing to accept Chinese customers and authorities conducting surprise health checks on foreign workers.

Islamic State affiliates in Indonesia are using the coronavirus to stoke resentment towards Chinese Indonesians, while in Bukittinggi, on the island of Sumatra, several hundred people marched to a Novotel hotel to demand that Chinese tourists return home.

In the Philippines, Adamson University in Manila openly called for its “Chinese” students to stop attending classes.

Such incidents are worrying enough, but there is always the risk of far uglier manifestations of prejudice, given the region’s long history of Sinophobia, expressed in discriminatory economic policies and, on occasion, violent pogroms.

The Mongolian Octopus – His Grip on Australia, was a cartoon published in The Bulletin in Australia in 1886.

At the beginning of the colonial era, small communities of ethnic Chinese, often concentrated in mercantile and retail professions, could be found across Southeast Asia. European colonialists either suppressed or facilitated Chinese economic activities, but from the outset, they imported the tropes of European anti-Semitism by referring to Chinese as the “Jews of Southeast Asia”.