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Politics of creed

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As one of the few Chinese immigrants to Northern Ireland in the mid-1970s, Anna Lo Man-wah didn't exactly receive a warm welcome. One day in 1978, she was walking down a busy street in Belfast when she came across five young people who started hurling racial abuse at her.

She moved to the edge of the footpath to avoid them, and as they went past her, one of them kicked her from behind. She stumbled but didn't fall, and the group ran across the street 'still jumping up and down shouting abuse at me', she recalled.

'That would have been the most frightening incident,' Ms Lo said. 'I felt very angry, humiliated. I don't know what would have happened if it wasn't broad daylight.'

Despite incidents like that, Ms Lo persevered with her new life in Northern Ireland and after spending her career mainly as a social worker with the Chinese community, she announced last month that she would run for a seat in the upcoming March elections for the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Ms Lo, 56, will run on behalf of the cross-community Alliance party in the South Belfast constituency, and in doing so will become Northern Ireland's first Chinese candidate for the assembly as well as the first ethnic minority candidate to run for a winnable seat.

Ms Lo's election bid reflects the growing number of Chinese and other ethnic minorities in Northern Ireland since the signing of the Good Friday peace accords in April 1998, which helped end the three-decade-long period of sectarian strife known as the Troubles. As peace has fallen on the British territory, the economy has revived, and unemployment has fallen to a low, drawing in migrant workers from other countries. But that has also resulted in the predictable backlash among locals towards outsiders. The changing face of predominantly white Northern Ireland, which includes a growing number of Chinese, Muslims, Filipinos and blacks, is one of the reasons that prompted Ms Lo to run.

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