Between precarious foreignness and praise for China: the citizenship constellations of white Europeans in China during the early Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

This article investigates how white European (mostly Swiss) foreigners living in Beijing, Shanghai, and various cities in the Pearl River Delta have negotiated their social and legal positions during the early Covid-19 pandemic. Their transnational citizenship constellation spans two political systems that are commonly thought of as incommensurable and whose legitimacy is mutually contested by opponents of either model of governance. My research illustrates how this polarization was exacerbated during the Covid-19 pandemic. The research participants noted how the position of white, Western foreigners in China was shifting as they became exposed to suspicion of being potential carriers of the virus and to a related uptick in xenophobia. They felt that the Chinese authorities and media externalized and racialized the new corona virus to enhance the legitimacy of the authoritarian regime vis-à-vis the domestic population; but they also considered the Chinese response to the outbreak of Covid-19 at the time a success overall and praised people in China for their compliance with state measures. How these white European foreigners in China navigated the early Covid-19 era is thus mediated by the larger geopolitical polarization between China and “the West” inherent in their citizenship constellation, racialized social hierarchies among foreigners in China, and an ambiguity between the experience of being othered and their identification with the Chinese approach to containing Covid-19.