In February, an 18-year-old Singaporean, Nick Lee Xing Qiu, was detained for planning to attack Malays and Muslims after being radicalised by violent far-right extremist ideologies. According to Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs, Lee was inspired by white supremacists in the US. Lee was allegedly radicalised online by extremist content, leading to his violent and hostile attitudes towards Muslims. Lee came across anti-Muslim content owing to the “online algorithms” on social media that recommended “far-right extremist material” to him. Despite being a Singaporean of Chinese ethnicity, who believed in the superiority of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese ethnicities, he supported white supremacy as he considered Islam to be a threat to “white culture.”
This Insight will discuss and analyse how violent white supremacist and far-right extremist networks from the West have been influencing the homegrown non-white extremists in different Asian countries. These non-white extremists draw symbols, terms, and ideology from white supremacists and neo-Nazis, and express violent anti-migrant, antisemitic, and anti-Muslim rhetoric in relation to the local context.
White Supremacy Takes Root in Asia
In 2023, another Singaporean teenager of Chinese ethnicity was issued with a restriction order by the Singaporean police – where he was not permitted to change his residence, leave the country, or have access to the internet or social media without the approval of the director of the Internal Security Department. He was accused of espousing white supremacist ideologies, and accessing violent extremist material and videos propagated by American white supremacist Paul Nicholas Miller.
The dominance of white supremacist ideology among people of colour is no longer a paradox. Besides Singapore, several other Asian countries, including Japan, India, and China’s autonomous Mongolian region, have witnessed that their homegrown far-right is identifying with white supremacy and neo-Nazis in the West.
Studies show that white supremacy is radicalising individuals to racial violence far beyond the West, including Asia, and there is a white supremacist terrorist threat to the region. Right-wing violent extremists in the European Union participate in transnational and transcontinental networks and ideological debates, especially in messaging and online gaming platforms and related environments where English is the lingua franca. There are direct Western extreme right influences on the Southeast Asian extreme right community. Despite right-wing extremism being considered among the least recognised security risks in Asia, research has revealed that there is an emerging pan-Asian movement whose members more “closely resemble adherents of fascism and white supremacy in countries in the Global North” and some Asian extremists manifest themselves in the ideology and messaging of right-wing violent extremists in Europe and North America.
“Multi-Racial Whiteness”
White supremacists, driven by fear of losing power in an ever-changing multicultural landscape, exhibit far-right ideologies – nationalism, racism, xenophobia, anti-democracy and strong state advocacy. The concept of “whiteness”, however, has evolved, blurring the lines of race as those who are attracted by white supremacist ideology are no longer just white themselves.
Christina Beltran, professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University, uses the term “multi-racial whiteness” to describe people who appear to identify with whiteness, not as a racial construct but as an ideology of power, domination and supremacy. In the Washington Post, Beltran wrote, “multiracial whiteness reflects an understanding of whiteness as a political colour and not simply a racial identity – a discriminatory worldview in which feelings of freedom and belonging are produced through the persecution and dehumanisation of others”.
Despite being subjected to racism themselves from the white supremacists in the US, some Asian-Americans have become key allies of white supremacists.
Islamophobia as the Glue for Transnational White Supremacy Online
The Internet accelerated and deepened the internationalisation of the white supremacist and right-wing extremist scene. In its early days, forums on the Internet promoted the interaction among extremist individuals and networks, developing cross-border shared identities and common perspectives on issues key to white supremacists within the West. But in the past few years, the white supremacist and violent extremist content generated from the West has found an audience among the non-white population in Asia.
White supremacy is propagated on conventional social media and messaging platforms, including X, Facebook, and Instagram, alongside less-conventional platforms including Telegram, Gab, and 8Chan, and video-sharing sites such as YouTube. A 2024 study revealed that gaming platforms have been exploited by those seeking to “spread hateful ideologies” online, and extremist groups exploit technology for recruitment, propaganda and fundraising.
Islamophobia is the transnational glue that brings together extremely heterogeneous organisations operating in different political systems online.
In the case of Singapore’s Lee, he came across Islamophobic and far-right extremist content on social media –which analysts label as “dark” digital spaces as well. He re-posted far-right extremist videos and uploaded about 20 self-created videos that glorified far-right terrorists and contained anti-Muslim rhetoric. The Singaporean teenager, who was arrested in 2023, had expressed his plans for conducting a mass shooting in the US in 10 years in a far-right online chat group and searched for weapons online, as well.
Research shows that the Islamophobia embedded in the messaging of Hindu nationalist extremists (Hindutva actors) and the disinformation networks of white supremacy in the UK on X, creates a symbiotic foundation for digital hate infrastructures. While populist tendencies may dominate these groups’ national narratives, their ability to attract international audiences relies on how they politicise Islamophobic sentiments. A recent report co-published by the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI) and the VOX-Pol Institute, stated that two imageboard websites populated by India’s Hindu nationalist extremists – “Indiachan” and “BharatChan” – are active on chan sites like 8chan and 4chan. These boards are “inspired by their equivalents based in North America or Europe, including in terms of their layout, community culture and ideological tendencies, they have an explicitly Indian focus,” according to the report. Multiple examples of explicit incitement to violence against Muslims, in addition to trolling, antisemitism and Hindu supremacism, were found on “Bharatchan’s” board.
A 2024 study by the Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD) stated that white supremacist material is used to express anti-migrant, antisemitic, and anti-Muslim rhetoric in high-performing videos on TikTok, and TikTok appears to be algorithmically amplifying and recommending white supremacist content to users. This is merely one example of social media facilitating the access of extremist material between the Global North and Global South. This has enabled malign actors to interact with each other across boundaries, making them highly effective recruitment tools for the White Identity Terrorist Movement (WITM) and racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism (REMVE) groups.
Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, noted that the internet and social media act “as an equaliser” for all far-right individuals, which allow them to participate in hate online, regardless of their background. Owing to its low maintenance cost and geographical expansion, social media has been helping the far-right in growing transnational connections across the globe. Studies revealed that radical and violent extremist elements active in South and South-east Asia were earlier mostly exposed to Islamist radicalism online. Violence attempted or perpetrated by right-wing extremists have been very infrequent compared with violence by regionally dominant extremist ideologies, such as those associated with ISIL/Da’esh and Al-Qaida Jihadists.
But that has changed in recent years.
The white supremacist extremist individuals and networks share ideologies, tactics and funding as well as mobilise followers and promote extremist literature. This growing transnational network of white supremacists in the West has inspired the Asian far-right as well.
Tailoring White Supremacy in the Local Context
The Great Replacement conspiracy theory inspired Singapore’s Lee to express his hatred against the local Malay Muslim population. According to Singapore’s internal security department, Lee “believed that violent action had to be taken to prevent the Chinese majority in Singapore from being supplanted by what he perceived to be a rapidly growing Malay population.” Lee aimed to spark a “race war” between Chinese and Malays.
Numerous violent white supremacist terrorists have endorsed the Great Replacement. The underlying fears that drive the conspiracy – that Western countries are being “Islamised” and there is an urgent need for an ethnically or culturally homogeneous society – have been widely accepted among the far-right actors rooted in Asia.
Adoption of Neo-nazi ideology
As the white supremacist movement has drawn symbols, terms, and ideology directly from Nazi Germany and Holocaust-era fascist movements, some Asian supremacists have also been inspired by the Nazis. This common source of inspiration brings them closer.
India’s Hindutva ideology, followed by Hindu nationalist extremists, is one such movement that the Nazis have inspired. Like the Nazis considered the Germans as the pure “Aryan” race, Hindutva ideologues also consider Hindus pure and a superior race over Muslims.
The neo- the Nazi swastika was found to be displayed at the top of the page of India’s Hindu supremacist online group, “Indiachan”, on 8chan, last year.
Mongolian far-right group Tsagaan Khass is another Asian group inspired by Nazis and white supremacists. The group’s name directly translates into “White Swastika”. The group has targeted Chinese-Mongolian inter-racial couples and engaged in anti-immigrant violence. While the group justifies racism by white people in the West because their countries have been over-run by non-white peoples, their indigenous cultures destroyed, and their racial purity “compromised”, it draws a parallel with the skin-head movement of the West for itself.
Figure 1: Post from a documentary on YouTube: Kazunari Yamada, the leader of neo-Nazi National Socialist Japanese Workers Party, uses the internet to connect to Nazis across the globe.
In Japan – where the white supremacy movement places the Japanese as “honorary” whites — supporters of Neo Nazi group, National Socialist Japanese Workers party, are seen wearing swastika armbands. While Japan has become “the darling of the white supremacist US Alt-Right”, who admire what they perceive to be an “ethnically homogeneous country”, social media has played a role in propagating white supremacism in Japan too.
The far-right online ecosystem in Japan includes both explicit networks across digital platforms and implicit connections formed through shared xenophobic, nativist, racist, anti-feminist, anti-establishment, and illiberal discourses. Online mobilisation has led to unchecked radicalisation and physical attacks on the Korean community.
Last year, the Austronesian supremacist community – the community that advocates for the ethnic superiority of Austronesians – an ethnolinguistic group comprising significant populations in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore — was found to be adapting the Western extreme right playbook on TikTok. They localised interpretations of Western extreme right narratives – such as the Great Replacement conspiracy theory – to “demonise local Rohingya refugees and other perceived non-indigenous communities”, promoting calls for “Total Rohingya Deaths” or “Total Chinese Deaths”. There is a clear influence from both the online Western extreme right meme subculture and the distinct local context on a variety of Austronesian supremacist content.
The Pan-Asian fascist movement, which espouses the slogan “Asia for Asians”, also draws similarities with the Europeans who adhered to Hitler’s idea of a master race during the 1930s and 1940s. They see whites as allies because of common enemies. Furthermore, Indonesian-speaking right-wing extremist accounts on Telegram express neo-Nazi views, including in discussions of Mein Kampf. Many Asian right-wing extremists in Thailand have been adopting Nazi logos, symbols and costumes in recent years.
Conclusions and Recommendations
Major technology companies – mostly based in the US – have both the capacity and the responsibility to take stronger action against the spread of white supremacy on their platforms. The formation of “platform councils”, which could primarily be forums for both ordinary digital users and technology experts, could lead to the development of a more legitimate consensus regarding the governance and use of digital platforms. This would enable the sharing of responsibility and risk related to content moderation and user access among the technology companies that develop and operate digital platforms, the governments responsible for regulating them, and the users themselves.
While tech companies must act with clarity, consistency and transparency, they must ideally proactively take down white supremacist content. They must prevent the accounts from regenerating content, thus contesting the virtual safe haven that the white supremacists transnationally enjoy. Additionally, governments ideally should work in tandem with these platforms to ensure that the latter establish that their terms of service do not permit any hate speech, even when shared by public figures.
In many cases, right-wing or far-right extremists in South-East Asia often work in support of or in “parallel with the established authority”; therefore, governments may not see them as a significant threat to national or regional security. But if violent white supremacy and far-right extremism are treated with the same seriousness as the countries waged the global war on terror against Islamists post-9/11, the world liberal order, perhaps, could remain unchallenged to a certain extent.
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Sonia Sarkar is pursuing European Master’s in Human Rights and Democratisation at the Global Campus of Human Rights. She holds an MPhil in Conflict Resolution and Reconciliation from Trinity College Dublin. Her main research area is the transnational networks of the far-right in Global South and Global North. As a journalist for over two decades, she has reported on religious extremism alongside politics, and political violence from different parts of Asia. Her bylines have appeared in The Telegraph (India), South China Morning Post, Al Jazeera, Religion Unplugged, DW and Nikkei Asia.
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