Hong Kong protests to Uygur camps: how Chinese students became a subject of scorn

Campus confrontations have erupted from Canada to New Zealand as mainland Chinese students react, sometimes violently, to public scrutiny of Beijing’s policies

Such conflict is likely to persist as Chinese diplomatic missions support robust rebuttals to those who disagree with China’s stance

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Many young Hongkongers have mixed feelings towards their mainland compatriots. Photo: Robert Ng

Published: 5:00am, 10 Aug 2019Updated: 12:48am, 11 Aug 2019

A creative but controversial meme has been racking up likes on a Facebook page titled SFU Dank Memes, a private group frequented by more than 3,700 students at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University (SFU).

It features a Photoshopped image of a duplicitous masked operative from the popular video game Team Fortress 2 and an accompanying caption that reads: “Try to figure out who’s the Chinese communist spy at SFU when half the school is Chinese. And worst of all, he could be any one of us.”

The purported undercover agent in their midst is an unidentified vandal captured by security cameras last week wrecking the university’s so-called Lennon Wall, a noticeboard turned campaign space which has been covered with a mosaic of multicoloured messages in support of Hong Kong’s anti-government protests.

The wall has become one of several flashpoints amid an increasingly bitter debate among overseas ethnic Chinese students, which has sparked sometimes testy confrontations emotionally charged by questions of identity, history and political belief.

This creative but controversial meme has been racking up likes on Facebook. Photo: Facebook

“To me, these memes aren’t even funny and merely show ignorance – similar to the racist jokes people made during earlier decades of Chinese immigration,” said 20-year-old student Matthew Wu, who hails from mainland China. “We are talking about serious discrimination towards mainlanders here.”

Wu, who declined to provide his real name, is among the 1.5 million Chinese students studying outside the country who have found themselves thrust into the spotlight at university campuses from Australia to New Zealand to Canada. Hong Kong’s extradition bill protests, sometimes unruly, have rocked the city since June and have renewed international scrutiny of Beijing’s policies.

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