Sinophobia

How the nineteenth century wrote it into law

In the United States the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was passed in response to growing Sinophobia. It prohibited all immigration of Chinese labourers and turned those already in the country into second-class persons, and it holds the distinction of being the first American immigration law to target a specific ethnicity or nationality. In Peru in the same century, Chinese workers were used as slave labour and barred from holding any important position in society.

The hostility ran in the other direction as well, from Europe into China. Lord Palmerston, who considered Chinese culture uncivilised, was responsible for sparking the First Opium War of 1839 to 1842, and his view of the country played a significant part in his decision to declare it. The disdain became more common during the Second Opium War of 1856 to 1860, when repeated attacks on foreign traders in China inflamed anti-Chinese feeling abroad. After China's defeat, Lord Elgin arrived in Peking in 1860 and ordered the sacking and burning of the imperial Old Summer Palace in vengeance.

Why the numbers were never the point

Chinese workers had been a fixture on London's docks since the middle of the eighteenth century, arriving as sailors employed by the East India Company on the tea and spice routes. Conditions on those voyages were bad enough that many absconded rather than face the return, and those who stayed settled near the docks, running laundries and lodging houses for other sailors or selling Asian produce.

By the 1880s a small and recognisable Chinese community had formed in Limehouse, and Sinophobic feeling rose among other Londoners who feared that these workers would take their jobs by accepting lower wages and longer hours. The entire Chinese population of London was in the low hundreds. The population of the city was roughly seven million.

Nativist feeling ran high regardless, and the Aliens Act of 1905 sought to restrict the entry of poor and low-skilled foreign workers. The involvement of some Chinese Londoners with criminal organisations gave the sentiment something to point at.

Why the resentments differ by place

The clichés attached to Chinese people are frequently conflated with those attached to other Asian ethnic groups, a merger known as the Yellow Peril. What that conflation hides is that the specific hostilities differ sharply by place, and most of them are about proximity rather than about race.

In Kazakhstan, a country not previously known for anti-Chinese feeling, hostility has grown since independence, fed by a long history of territorial disputes and perceived Chinese imperialism among intellectuals, and sharpened by the repression of the Kazakh minority in Xinjiang. Kyrgyzstan follows a similar pattern for similar reasons.

In Mongolia the standard belief is that China intends to undermine Mongolian sovereignty and eventually absorb the country, and hostility extends to people of mixed Han Chinese and Mongol descent, who have a derogatory term of their own.

In Hong Kong the sentiment is driven mostly by political opposition to the mainland government, mixed with hostility towards mainlanders themselves. In 2012 a group of residents published a newspaper advertisement depicting mainland visitors and immigrants as locusts, and in February 2014 about a hundred people harassed mainland tourists and shoppers in Kowloon in what they called an anti-locust protest, after which the territory's Equal Opportunities Commission proposed extending its race-hate laws to cover mainlanders.

In South Korea a poll conducted in 2022 found 81 percent of respondents holding negative views of China and 77 percent holding negative views of Chinese people, which is an unusually small gap between a country and its population. In Japan a survey of 2017 found 51 percent of Chinese respondents reporting discrimination from landlords.

What the pandemic reopened

The COVID-19 pandemic produced a resurgence of Sinophobia across a full range of severity:

• at the covert end, microaggression, stigmatisation, exclusion and shunning
• at the overt end, verbal abuse and physical violence

That range is the useful thing about the record. A word ending in this suffix suggests a state of mind, and the documented history of this one is mostly a history of laws, advertisements, tenancy decisions and assaults, which are actions rather than feelings.