American attacked by mob in China. Crowd chants 'Kill him!'

From Shanghaiist comes this disturbing story of a young American attacked by a mob of angry Chinese outside a Carrefour store in Zhuzhou, Hunan Province, on Sunday night:

Last night [Sunday, Apr. 20] around 7pm my friend was attacked by a mob of about 150 people outside the Carrefour in Zhuzhou, Hunan.... When leaving Carrefour some of the crowd started shouting at him and he tried to say he didn't have anything to do with the Olympics, but 3 men started to push him and then he was hit in the back of the head at least 3 times. He started to run, and the mob chased him. He jumped into a cab, but the mob surrounded the car and started shaking and rocking it. The cab driver was shouting at him to get out. Then they started hitting the car. The crowd was shouting "kill him! kill the Frenchman." He called the Field Director while in the back of the car. The cab driver abandon the car when he saw police coming. Two police made there way though the mob and managed to drive the cab away. The Field Director alerted.... The police got him another cab and he took it from Zhuzhou to the field director's home in Changsha. He spending the night here in Changsha and is likely leaving China as soon as possible.

The French supermarket chain has been under siege in China over the past week. And it's hardly alone. A similarly disturbing, though less violent, episode took place last week right here at home -- at Duke University -- when a 20-year-old freshman from China who had tried to encourage dialogue between Chinese student demonstrators and a smaller group of Tibetans found her personal information published on the Internet. Hundreds of thousands of angry and threatening posts appeared on Chinese Web sites. Back in China, the student's parents were threatened and had to go into hiding.

It's all part of an increasingly scary rise in nationalism on the mainland. According to the IHT, Beijing has encouraged such nationalistic fervor to run amok by easing up on restrictions on online forums in recent weeks. If true, that news is disturbing. Because in just a few months, 500,000 foreign tourists will begin arriving in China for the Olympics. What kind of welcome are they going to receive?

(Hat tip: Passport reader hdp)