The Covid-19 pandemic has given rise to stigma, discrimination, and even hate crimes against various populations in the Chinese language–speaking world. Using interview data with victims, online observation, and the data mining of media reports, this paper investigated the changing targets of stigma from the outbreak of Covid-19 to early April 2020 when China had largely contained the first wave of Covid-19 within its border. We found that at the early stage of the pandemic, stigma was inflicted by some non-Hubei Chinese population onto Wuhan and Hubei residents, by some Hong Kong and Taiwan residents onto mainland Chinese, and by some Westerners towards overseas Chinese. With the number of cases outside China surpassing that in China, stigmatization was imposed by some Chinese onto Africans in China. We further explore how various factors, such as the fear of infection, food and mask culture, political ideology, and racism, affected the stigmatization of different victim groups. This study not only improved our understanding of how stigmatization happened in the Chinese-speaking world amid Covid-19 but also contributes to the literature of how sociopolitical factors may affect the production of hate crimes.
Conventional discourse in citizenship studies tend to assume that individuals are clearly aware of their rights and this rights-consciousness drives them to participate actively. This assumption, however, neglects the cases of interest-driven participation before the advent of rights-consciousness of the participants. By studying the homeowners’ collective action in Beijing, this study finds that the most direct incentive motivating the homeowners to participate in the first place is self-interest rather than strong rights-consciousness. Homeowners become actively involved in the process of democratic participation well before they have acquired a clear and strong sense of rights-consciousness. Nevertheless, despite starting off as interest-oriented, homeowners’ democratic practices have awakened their rights-consciousness and further cultivated a sense of citizenship identity. This interest-driven participation has paradoxically helped to create the democratic ethic of Chinese urban citizens. It has important implications for understanding political participation as well as citizenship formation in China. 相似文献