Adam Minter, an American writer based in Shanghai, reflected on the racial subtext behind the anti-China protests on his blog Shanghai Scrap:
For all of the talk about racial tensions between Han Chinese and Tibetans, there has been surprisingly little talk about the obvious (to me) racial subtext to the anti-Chinese/pro-Tibetan protests in London, Paris, and San Francisco. But how can one miss the fact that the most vocal torch protesters (in much greater numbers than Tibetans) are white, while the most vocal torch supporters are Asian? Put differently, why are there so few Caucasians turning out to vocally support the torch run? Can the difference really be chalked up to politics and/or ignorance? After all, Chinese living in London, Paris, and San Francisco have access to the same news sources as Caucasians.
Brendan O’Neill, editor of a UK-based online magazine Spiked, wrote about the same topic in an in-depth analysis of the media’s coverage of Chinese flame guards:
The reason the Chinese flame guards can be described as horrible, ominous, subnormal robots who were looking to carry out ‘a Tiananmen Square’ in central London – in spite of all the evidence that actually they were your average unarmed foreign security officials working in tandem with the British authorities – is because this discussion has been underpinned by new China-bashing prejudices rather than by factual evidence or political analysis. And the prejudice has spread, like a virus, from London to Paris to San Francisco to Australia.
Read more of O’Neill’s article Invasion of the robotic thugs
