Egyptians offering the Chinese man flowers - still image from Facebook video by Fayhaa Wang

CAIRO - 11 March 2020: The police are trying to locate two men who bullied a Chinese man in Cairo under the premise of coronavirus, as the driver who forced him out of the car was arrested Wednesday.



The Chinese ambassador to Cairo Liao Liqiang visited the Chinese visitor in his Giza hotel on Wednesday to lift his spirits after the bullying incident.



A Chinese journalist in Egypt, Fayhaa Wang, posted a video of a group of Egyptians visiting the bullying victim in his hotel, offering him flowers and apologizing in Arabic and Chinese. Wang wrote on Facebook that the Chinese ambassador told the man the incident is not representative of the Egyptian people.







Earlier this week, two men noticed an Asian looking man in the backseat of a car, and the Egyptian driver was holding tissues against his mouth and nose. They began filming the man, and pushing the driver to kick the Chinese man out of the car. He got out of the car on the highway Ring Road, and tried to stop any car to take him, but the two men followed him and telling people to "run from corona."



The man looked rather confused, with him trying to avoid the two men and stop cars honking at him to get away from the middle of the road.



One of the two men posted the video on Facebook, saying "detecting a coronavirus case on the Ring Road," with the impression that he thought the video was funny. But the backlash on the video was huge, he soon had to delete his Facebook account. The identity of the two men is now known to the police, but are yet to be detained.



Numerous Egyptians shared the video, expressing their empathy with the Chinese man, lamenting the reactions of the people in the video and apologizing to the Chinese people. Arabic hashtags dubbed "together against coronavirus" and "no to racism" were trending in Egypt.



The driver told the police he was taking the Chinese man from a hotel in Maadi to Abbasiya, when he noticed that the passenger was "coughing forcefully," so he forced him to leave the car. The driver then headed home and is in quarantine in a hospital in Abbasiya.



A Chinese journalist in Egypt, Fayhaa Wang, posted a video of a group of Egyptians visiting the bullying victim in his hotel, offering him flowers and apologizing in Arabic and Chinese. Wang wrote on Facebook that the Chinese ambassador told the man the incident is not representative of the Egyptian people.



