United Kingdom

As soon as I walked into the train carriage, a whole family packed up their belongings and shuffled nervously to the next one. It happened on a train from Oxford to London earlier this month. I am an ordinary postgraduate student but for the fact, extraordinary in these times, that I’m Chinese. As the coronavirus outbreak spreads around the world, I have been experiencing a different epidemic – one of racism and xenophobia. I felt unwelcome. For the first time in years, I was self-conscious of my status as the person of color in a white space, the alien in a culture whose values I share. I expected a better Britain than the one in which two of my Hong Kong friends, walking on a Manchester st

Controversy over a British royal using his pedigree to sell milk in China has erupted into a race-related scandal after celebrity anchor Piers Morgan mocked the Chinese language on live television. Peter Phillips, the 42-year-old grandson of Queen Elizabeth, was initially criticized after he appeared sipping a glass of milk in a commercial by Shanghai-based Bright Food Group, China’s second-largest food conglomerate. In the ad shown on Dragon TV, Phillips boasts of being raised on Jersey milk from the herd at Windsor Castle before savoring the milk in a room that looks like an English aristocratic home with a view over Shanghai. Piers Morgan, host of the ITV show Good Morning Britain, then f

A six-year-old British girl from south London in the UK found a Christmas card with a message allegedly from foreign prisoners in China. The sender of the message claimed that prisoners were being forced to work against their will in the Shanghai Qingpu prison. The holiday card, which is among those sold to raise money for charity, was bought from British supermarket chain Tesco. The retailer said it has halted production at a Chinese factory after the discovery and launched an investigation into Zheijiang Yunguang Printing, one of its suppliers located about 60 miles from the prison named in the message.