Zhou made a massive impact with a 25-tweet thread she posted on Friday, talking of the racist abuse she has received in Sweden, posting photos of two men she says made slitty-eye gestures at her and used racist terms, and posting a video of a woman who says “I don’t care about you Asian trash”.
At the time of writing, her tweet has has had nearly 25,000 retweets, nearly 5,000 quote tweets and 150,000 likes.
Zhou has shared screenshots with The Local of the message she received from the police telling her they were laying down her case against the two young men, together with screenshots of emails she sent asking for updates on the case while it was going on.
Since Zhou posted the photos, several respondents on Twitter have named the two men whose photos she posted. When The Local checked the Facebook account of one of them, the photos clearly matched. The Local then spoke to the man on his phone and texted him the photos Zhou had posted. He then removed the profile picture from his Facebook account.
The overwhelming majority of the commentary on Swedish twitter has dismissed her account, however, with some influential figures accusing her of being part of a Chinese government influence campaign.
Hanif Bali, the former Moderate MP and Expressen newspaper columnist, came very close to calling her an agent, saying her tweet had been part of “a Chinese strategy to accused Sweden of racism”.
“The Chinese strategy of accusing Sweden of racism is proven, that trust-fund babies planted in the West can do it in woke clothing is even better,” he wrote on Twitter.
Ivar Arpi, the former editor Bulletin of the far-right Bulletin newspaper and a prominent right-wing commentator, also wrote on Twitter that she was a “woke activist whose business idea is to accuse the West of systemic racism”, and said that “her credibility is low”.
Others queued up on Twitter to say that the two young man she had accused of racially harassing her “looked Bosnian” and were “definitely not Swedish”.
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When The Local contacted Zhou, who is currently in America, she said that the reaction in Sweden had been “absolutely absurd”.
“They are full of bullshit. And I think that their rhetoric is dangerous,” she said of Arpi and Bali. “They’re saying that I’m destabilising Sweden. I think they are destabilising Sweden with their misleading and factually false, antagonistic rhetoric.’
“I think how much reach they have is a very dangerous thing, and I don’t doubt for a second that this contributed to the rise of fascism in Sweden.”
Zhou said that she was astounded by how little evidence commentators had for their accusations that she was working for the Chinese state.
“These folks are constructing these arguments out of nowhere, saying that because I have an aunt by marriage who works for the government, that I’m an agent,” she said. “It’s a diversion to distract us from the main point, which is that there’s a problem in Sweden, and they really need to reckon with that.”
What’s more, the claim that the young men whose photos she posted do not ‘look Swedish’ only goes to underline her point, she argues.
“It’s ironic, because to deflect from the fact that these were Swedish people, they say, ‘oh, they look Bosnian, or they were Kurdish’. That is actually an incredibly racist thing to say.”
As for her own background, she claims she was born in Minnesota and brought up in North Carolina by two Chinese academics who were in no way regime supporters, and who had come to the US in the early 1990s for doctoral and masters’ studies.
“My dad was attending Tsinghua University, one of the most prestigious schools in Beijing, at the time of Tiananmen Square massacre and he almost went to the protests with a bunch of his friends. It was lucky that he didn’t, because he could have been killed. Several of his classmates were,” she said. “And my mom was an active protester against the government at her university campus.”
Both of her parents’ families suffered as a result at the hands of the Communist party.
“My paternal grandfather was a student activist during the Hundred Flowers Campaign, where a bunch of intellectuals, the intelligentsia class, spoke out against Chairman Mao and the government’s horrible policies, and he was sent to a labour camp for a decade,” she says. Her mother’s family faced discrimination due to their Japanese heritage.
“So for them to spin this is just hilarious to me. Because I know my family background, and my Mom’s been kicked off a bunch of WeChat channels, because she actively talks about this stuff, and about how the government is corrupt.”
The only source of evidence Twitter critics seem to have that Zhou is a Chinese agent is a section of her LinkedIn profile where she talks of interviewing the Division Director of China’s Department of Finance on stage while at Duke University, adding “who also happens to be my aunt”.
Zhou tells the local that the woman had only been her aunt by marriage, adding that she only discovered that she was when she came to the event, and had not met her before the interview or spoken to her since.
“I didn’t invite her to speak at my university. It was an aunt that I’ve never met before until that instance,” he says. “She and a couple of other officials were at my university for a policy event. I didn’t know her until that point, and I haven’t seen her since that point.”
Zhou told The Local that she didn’t think that Sweden was in any way a uniquely racist country, but she said that in her opinion the debate over racism and the awareness of it among Swedes was way behind countries like the US and the UK.
“The discourse here is, like, five decades behind, and that’s not surprising, because they didn’t have people of colour here until, like, the 60s or 70s,” she says. “They don’t have the vocabulary to talk about it. I don’t think they have the awareness to talk about it, which is, in some ways understandable because immigration is a new phenomenon.”
Sweden “really does need these wake-up calls”, she suggests.
“They need to reckon with the fact that they have a problem. Those young kids growing up here whose parents have moved here, they deserve better. They deserve to be treated with respect.”