How safe is China for foreigners, really?

Relatively safe, but possibly getting less so

After June’s tragic knife attack on a Japanese school bus in Suzhou, which came just two weeks after another attack against four Americans in a park in Jilin, China’s main internet platforms are finally being compelled to do something about extreme nationalistic hate speech.

This is hardly surprising. These events may officially be dismissed as random attacks carried out by lunatics, but everyone in China understands full well that the foreignness of the victims is not coincidental, and that there is a causal relationship between hate speech against foreign countries and physical attacks against foreigners.

Knife attacks against foreigners are nothing new in China. The most famous case in recent years occurred in 2015, when a young Chinese man attacked a French man and his local wife with a sword in broad daylight and in the middle of Sanlitun, Beijing's most international district. The man was injured, his wife tragically killed. The killer later stated he wanted to “kill an American”. I lived in Sanlitun for several years, and I would regularly pass by the precise spot where the attack happened. 

There have been more such incidents. In 2018, a Pakistani foreign student was stabbed and killed by a Chinese man on a street in Nanjing, after they got into a small argument. In 2017, a Frenchman was attacked with a knife in Shanghai by a Chinese man, who the media reported was mentally ill. Fortunately, his wounds were light.

In 2012, an American businessman was attacked and stabbed in the buttocks by a local man in the middle of Beijing. In 2008, during the Olympics, an American tourist was stabbed to death and his wife seriously injured while visiting the Drum Tower in Beijing. And that’s just the cases I happen to know about, it’s by no means an exhaustive list.

The fact is, though, that up to now serious violence against foreigners in China has remained the exception rather than the norm. Attacks like the ones mentioned above tend to happen on a yearly basis, not a monthly or a weekly one. If you are a foreigner in China (and by this I mean someone who looks recognisably non-Chinese), your chances of being the target of deadly racist violence are, for the time being, objectively slim.

The occurrence of two violent attacks against foreign targets in just two weeks is striking, and makes me wonder if we might be on the cusp of a steep increase in such events. The nightmare scenario is one where years of nationalistic and xenophobic rhetoric and the recent economic downturn come together to produce a wave of anti-foreign violence.

Flowers left for the victim of the attack in Suzhou

The recent attacks are grim, but I can’t say I find them surprising. During my years in China I came to realise how deeply-rooted a certain kind of xenophobic thinking is in the country. In fact, more than once I asked myself why xenophobic violence doesn’t happen more often than it actually does.

I never faced any actual violence myself, thankfully. It was always pretty clear to me, though, that there was a resentment of foreigners bubbling below the surface. Occasionally, the hostility would spill over. Once, around 2017-18, I was walking with an American friend next to the subway stop of Chongwenmen, in central Beijing. The street was very crowded. It’s not an area where you get a lot of foreigners.

At one point, a young Chinese woman caught my eye. Suddenly, she turned around and started following us, walking a few metres behind us. Then she begun screaming at us in Chinese. I heard her shout that we foreigners come to China and give local women AIDS, and we should all be deported back to where we come from. She also said other stuff I couldn’t catch, but it was definitely centred around us being foreigners. After following us screaming for about 30 seconds, she turned around and vanished.

While this unedifying episode was unfolding, my friend and I knew exactly what to do: we continued walking along as if nothing was happening. We didn’t turn around, we didn’t confront the girl, we just waited and hoped she would go away and leave us alone (as she eventually did). We knew that creating a scene would have been unwise. We were surrounded by locals, and they would have been unlikely to take the side of two foreign men over a Chinese woman.

There were other occasions when I was shown open hostility simply because of my foreign features. Once, while I was walking down a street near my office, a man who looked like a migrant labourer walked up to me with a hard, angry look and then shoved me in the chest. I had never met the man before, but I was a visible foreigner in an area where you don’t see many. Another man, a mate of his, quickly pulled him away and said “Don’t mind him. He’s drunk”. I immediately got the hell out of there.

You will sometimes hear people who spent time in China talk about how friendly and welcoming the country is towards foreigners. Those who say this may have lived in Shanghai, where xenophobia is less overt than in other cities; there is also a good chance they lived in the country a relatively short time, speak little to no Chinese, and/or held well-paid positions in foreign companies or embassies, which insulated them from the country’s grimmer realities.

Outsiders who get to know China properly usually have a more nuanced story to tell. Chinese society has a strong “us vs. them” mentality towards foreigners. The belief that foreigners are afforded undue privileges is just as widespread as the idea that China’s officially-designated “ethnic minorities” enjoy special benefits and privileges that aren’t available to the Han majority. Both beliefs are based on a mix of half-truths and biased reporting from the Chinese media, and lead to widespread resentment against the groups benefiting from the supposed privileges.

As a foreigner you are seen as transient guests with one foot in your home country, no matter how long you have lived in China. Society expects you to keep your head down, display model behaviour and never stop proving you “respect China”, while being given no stake in the country or sense of belonging. You risk being personally blamed if your country has any kind of geopolitical spat with China, or “hurts the feelings of the Chinese people”, as state propaganda will put it. If you get into any sort of accident or dispute with a local, you may well find yourself assumed guilty until proven innocent.

Some blame foreigners in China for the xenophobia they encounter, claiming they attract hostility with their entitlement and insensitivity. I have certainly seen quite a few expats behave like total idiots in my time, just like I have seen plenty of others behave as decently as they could. But China’s xenophobia does not seem to be contingent on the actions of actual foreigners in China, especially since this latter group are few in number, and they have no impact on the lives of most Chinese. It is, rather, an attitude with deep roots in the country’s educational system, politics, history and culture, a topic I could write about for hours.

To be clear, I am not claiming that China is always unfriendly and unwelcoming for outsiders; quite the opposite. Attitudes towards foreigners worsened over the time I was there, but I never stopped encountering Chinese from all walks of life who were friendly and helpful towards me, in spite or often because of me being a foreigner.

In rural areas and the poorer interior of the country, sometimes described as being more conservative politically, I always found people to be particularly friendly. When I travelled in the mountains of north-western Sichuan some years back, locals literally wouldn’t stop inviting me to eat their food with them. This hospitality came from Han Chinese as well as members of the ethnic minorities native to the area.

In China’s big cities I encountered far more coldness and indifference, but even during my daily life in Beijing I never found a lack of people ready to chat, help, give advice. I lived in many ordinary neighbourhoods and, while I had some pretty awful Chinese neighbours in my time, I also had plenty who were nice and helpful, both Beijingers and waidiren (migrants from other provinces).

So yes, my personal experiences were not all bad, by any means. In fact, I would say the good outweighed the bad. But this never blinded me to the particular strain of xenophobia that is unfortunately so prevalent in modern China.

And yet, despite the country’s undeniable xenophobia, I have to say that the physical safety of living in China as a foreigner remains reasonably good. Most foreigners live in the big cities, where public order is enforced efficiently and ruthlessly. There is a widespread belief that crimes against foreigners will be dealt with swiftly and severely, which discourages people from messing with them. And, no doubt, most of the Chinese population is too busy thinking about their jobs and families to worry about the small minority of foreigners in their midst.

In fact, I would say that falling afoul of the country’s unreliable legal system is a far bigger risk than random racist violence. Over the years there have been quite a few cases of foreign citizens ending up in prison, or being barred from leaving the country, for highly dubious reasons, often amounting to being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But even in this respect, the risk remains statistically small. The truth is that most foreigners in China go for years without encountering anything worse than occasional hostile stares and remarks.

A sign displayed by a shop in China in early 2020

Over the past 10 years, frosty relations between China and the West and the growing nationalism in the Chinese media have created an atmosphere noticeably more hostile to foreigners. Chilling anti-foreign sentiments are sometimes expressed on Chinese social media, and the authorities rarely censor or rein in xenophobic discourse. All this has not, however, led to a sustained increase in xenophobic violence.

At the beginning of the Covid pandemic there was a further uptick in xenophobia, as “irresponsible” foreigners were blamed for bringing Covid back into the country, after China’s glorious “People’s War” had defeated the virus. Foreigners were shunned, barred from shops, subjected to discriminatory policies by local officials and generally treated like a health threat to be contained.

It was common at the time to hear unfriendly remarks, or people on the street warning their children to “keep away from the foreigner”. But there still wasn’t, at the end of the day, a real wave of anti-foreign violence. The way foreigners were treated could be unfair and unpleasant, but it was rarely frightening.

The question is whether life for foreigners in China will continue to remain safe in the future. China is a society with plenty of repressed frustration just waiting to find an outlet. Much of what frustrates people is either difficult to pinpoint or impossible to criticise, let alone do anything about, and foreigners will sometimes serve as convenient scapegoats.

The extent of China’s economic crisis is debatable, but the feeling that life can only go on getting better for everyone is gone. The CCP retains plenty of popular support, but there is an atmosphere of frustration and despondency among the young. That is why terms like “involution” and “lying flat” have become buzzwords.

While China is generally peaceful, and guns are extremely rare outside of the security forces, there have been plenty of cases over the years of “lone wolves” suddenly going on stabbing sprees in public spaces or driving cars into crowds. These sorts of incidents are reported by the Chinese press, although they appear to purposefully play them down. Worryingly, there have been quite a number of violent incidents this summer.

It isn’t hard to imagine that foreigners, either because of nationalism or just because they look different and attract the attention of disturbed people in a homogenous country, could turn into a target for this sort of violence. An organised xenophobic movement is unlikely, considering how tightly controlled Chinese politics is. But an increase in unstable, angry or desperate people taking their wrath out on foreigners is quite conceivable. In fact, I fear we may be seeing the beginning of it.