InfoSearched
Hate crimes against Chinese people in Britain have nearly tripled since the coronavirus first reached UK shores.
A Sky News investigation has found that police forces across the United Kingdom recorded a sharp spike in hate crimes targeting Chinese people in the first three months of 2020, as the coronavirus outbreak spread from Wuhan into a global pandemic. Freedom of Information data obtained by the broadcaster shows the surge began almost as soon as the virus made headlines, with victims reporting verbal abuse, harassment on public transport and physical assaults tied directly to the outbreak.
- Police forces recorded at least 267 hate crimes against Chinese people between January and March 2020, according to Freedom of Information responses obtained by Sky News.
- That rate was nearly three times higher than the equivalent figures logged during the same period in 2018 and 2019.
- Sky News reporters said they witnessed Chinese students being shouted at and abused by passersby even while being interviewed on camera about the abuse they had already faced.
The Numbers Behind the Surge
The 267 recorded incidents came from territorial police forces responding to FOI requests, and Sky News’ analysis found the timeline lines up almost exactly with the first confirmed COVID-19 cases in the UK in late January. Compared with the same three-month window in 2018 and 2019, the rate of hate crimes against Chinese victims was nearly triple, a jump investigators tied directly to fear and scapegoating around a virus that originated in Wuhan, China, in late 2019.
The data doesn’t capture every incident — hate crime figures are notoriously under-reported — but the scale of the increase across multiple forces was consistent enough that Sky News described it as a clear pattern rather than a statistical blip.
Abuse on the Streets and Public Transit
Victims described being harassed on buses and trains, verbally abused in public spaces, and in some cases physically attacked, with attackers directly blaming them for spreading the virus. The abuse wasn’t confined to isolated incidents reported after the fact — during on-the-ground reporting for the investigation, Sky News journalists watched Chinese students get shouted at by passersby in real time while they were being interviewed about the prejudice they’d already experienced.
Police forces recorded at least 267 hate crimes against Chinese people in three months — nearly three times the rate seen over the same period the previous two years.
That kind of abuse echoes what British Chinese communities described even before the FOI figures came in, when Sky News first reported accounts of people facing open hostility in the street tied to the outbreak’s origins in China.
Calls for the Home Office to Act
The figures prompted advocacy groups and politicians to press the Home Office for a formal response to the rising wave of anti-Chinese and anti-Asian discrimination. The concern isn’t limited to the UK — the pandemic’s early spread out of China, chronicled in reporting on Beijing’s eerie lockdown streets, coincided with a broader pattern of scapegoating that British police data now shows playing out on UK streets as well.
Sky News’ figures only cover January through March, and police forces were still compiling numbers as the outbreak accelerated into the spring. Whether the Home Office issues any formal guidance to forces on tracking and responding to coronavirus-linked hate crimes remains the open question hanging over this investigation — and with lockdown measures still in force across Britain in early May, the incidents Sky News documented were unlikely to be the last logged this year.
Warren insults Bloomberg after Nevada caucuses
U.S. Reopens Travel For The Vaccinated As COVID-19 Cases Surge Across Europe
IMF Sees `Heavy Cloud of Uncertainty’ Hanging Over Global Economy
Senate blocks two anti-abortion bills as reproductive rights battle heats up
Serbia protests against the government’s coronavirus response turn violent