The Chinese Embassy in India recently did something unusual – it reproduced a commentary from a state-backed news outlet urging Chinese netizens to approach India “rationally”.This came after a spate of xenophobic videos portraying Indians as uncivilised swept across the Chinese internet, coincidentally around the same time that videos falsely claiming Singapore had been overrun by Indians surfaced on the same platforms.The videos, some of which were manipulated, portrayed Indians as arriving in large numbers and behaving badly in public, reinforcing longstanding stereotypes of them as uncivilised.It wasn’t just videos. Chinese Ambassador to India Xu Feihong also came under attack,...