Stuck in Wuhan? White mobility capital and the evacuation of mixed-status families after the Covid-19 outbreak

Abstract

After the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan in January 2020, governments around the world evacuated their citizens from China. Soon, problems arose in relation to the evacuation of families made up of white Western migrants and Chinese citizens, as their mixed citizenship status prevented them from being evacuated as a family. By analyzing news reports, policy documents, and social media discussions about these families’ predicaments, this article investigates the reasons why they faced being separated in this time of crisis. Drawing on the concept of white mobility capital, it argues that the Covid-19 era brings to our attention the weak foundation of long-assumed mobility privileges among white migrants in China and sheds light on the precarious status of increasing numbers of mixed-status families in China.

Keywords:

• China
• Covid-19
• whiteness
• evacuation
• mobility capital

In the weeks after the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan, governments around the world organized evacuation flights to facilitate their citizens’ return from China. News reports indicate that more than fifty evacuation flights departed from Wuhan in the first month after the outbreak. On January 29, 206 Japanese citizens were flown to Tokyo and a plane carrying 195 US citizens landed on the March Air Reserve base in California. Soon after, planes also left Wuhan for destinations ranging from Sri Lanka to Mongolia, and India to Germany. Citizens who wanted to leave Wuhan contacted their Foreign Office to plan their departure. However, in some cases, people were confronted with unexpected problems when trying to plan their exit from the virus-stricken city.

On January 30, 2020, Nancy, a 31-year-old British woman and teacher who worked in Wuhan and lived there with her three-year-old son and her Chinese husband, posted an outcry on Facebook in which she recounted that the British Foreign Office had informed her that her son could not be evacuated due to his dual citizenship status. The child held a British passport yet was also a Chinese citizen under the Chinese Nationality Law of 1986. This law rules that any child born in China to one or two parents with Chinese citizenship is a Chinese citizen. Article 3 of this law also states that dual citizenship is not recognized for Chinese citizens. This means that children such as Nancy’s son, who are born in China into mixed-status families—with one parent who is a Chinese citizen and one parent who holds foreign citizenship—are Chinese citizens under Chinese law. Nancy was one of several foreigners in Wuhan whose families’ mixed citizenship and the ambiguous citizenship status of their child resulted in the possibility of separation in this moment of crisis. She, like others in similar situations, reacted with shock and surprise. Up to this point they had either not been fully informed about the Chinese citizenship laws that applied to their families or had been used to circumventing these laws with relative ease. In this moment of a Covid-19-induced global panic, the predicament of these families became front-page news, evoking heated debate on social media about whether they should be evacuated from China.

In this article, I analyze media reports and online debates about mixed-status families who faced being separated through evacuation. In doing so, I shed light on the positioning of Western migrants and the ambiguous citizenship status of children in mixed-status households in China. This article is organized as follows. First, I discuss the relevant literature and explain why mixed-status families in Wuhan faced being separated through evacuation after the outbreak of Covid-19. I focus on families that are made up of Chinese citizens and white immigrants from Western countries. Why could they not be evacuated as a family? And what does this situation tell us about the position of a white Western migrant in China? Second, I analyze debates about citizenship, migration, and race, explaining the idea of white mobility capital. Then, after discussing my research methods, I introduce two case studies and analyze debates about these families’ situations with a focus on how both newspaper reports and discussions on social media reveal conflicting and deeply entrenched racialized— and gendered—ideas about who belongs where. This article brings together the literature on increased international migration to China and debates in critical whiteness studies. It argues that the Covid-19 moment has brought attention to the weak foundation of long-assumed mobility privileges among white migrants in China and sheds light on the precarious status of the increasing number of mixed-status families in the country, following the growing popularity of China as a destination for international migrants.

Mixed-status families in China

Following China’s rise as an economic powerhouse, the country’s migrant population has quickly increased and diversified. Whereas migration to China used to be the preserve of the “transnational elites” (Willis and Yeoh 2002), in recent years international students from around the world have enrolled in Chinese universities and large numbers of young, self-initiated migrants from middle-class backgrounds have moved to China to benefit from the country’s booming economy (Camenisch 2019; Farrer 2010, 2020; Lehmann and Leonard 2018). Following this trend (as well as that of Chinese students going overseas to study), romantic relationships between migrants and Chinese citizens have become increasingly common, as illustrated by the emerging scholarship on foreign-Chinese relationships and mixed-status families in China.

In recent years, scholars have analyzed the family strategies of Chinese-African families (Lan 2015; Jordan et al. 2020), couples consisting of Chinese citizens and migrants from Western countries (Farrer 2008; Nehring and Wang 2016), and families formed by Chinese men and women from Russia and Ukraine (Barabantseva 2021), and countries in the southern border region, such as Vietnam (Barabantseva 2015). Most of this research focuses on how Chinese-African and Chinese-Russian families struggle with navigating China’s tightening immigration control and their precarious official position in a country where foreigners rarely achieve citizenship. In contrast, the research on Western-Chinese couples looks at Chinese-foreign marriages as an opportunity for either or both spouses to enhance their position in China and in transnational networks (Farrer 2008) or do not address the legal status of the foreign partner (Nehring and Wang 2016). This difference may be explained by the fact that Western migrants in China are known to navigate the country’s immigration policies with relative ease, applying for one long-term visa after another, while African migrants, for example, are issued short-term visas ranging from 30 days to one year. As a result, the latter group is regularly undocumented—and are stuck between not being allowed to stay and not being allowed to exit—when they choose to take the risk of overstaying their visas (Haugen 2019). The distinction between “desirable” and “undesirable” foreigners constructed by the Chinese state in recent years has further strengthened the privileged access of Western migrants to long-term Chinese visas. This is especially so after the point system was introduced in 2016, which has made applicants’ income and educational level crucial factors for measuring their desirability as migrants. Being relatively well-positioned in China’s racialized labour market (Lan 2022a), white Western migrants often secure long-term visas through their employers and choose to stay in China on independent work visas even after marrying Chinese citizens, thus avoiding becoming dependent on family guest (Q) visas, which do not permit the recipient to work.

This division has become even more pronounced when couples have children. Studies of Chinese-African families describe how couples try but fail to register their marriage and children in China due to the African partner’s struggle to live and work in China without becoming an illegal migrant (Haugen 2019; Lan 2015, 9; Jordan et al. 2020). This has serious social consequences, as an unregistered child cannot access the state services and benefits associated with Chinese citizenship. The Russian-speaking wives of Chinese men in Elena Barabantseva’s study (2019) have the opposite problem. These mothers live with the intense fear of losing their parental rights in the case of a divorce because of China’s Nationality Law and strict single citizenship regime. To secure their parental rights, these mothers apply for citizenship for their children in their home country, even if dual citizenship is not recognized by the Chinese state, and sometimes even successfully abandon their children’s Chinese citizenship (2019, 14).

Among mixed-status families involving partners from Western countries, it is also common for parents to apply for citizenship for their child in the country of the Western spouse. However, these couples rarely renounce the child’s Chinese citizenship, a process that has been described to me by those who have experienced it as extremely complicated and one that lasts two years. This means that, according to the Chinese Nationality Law, which extends Chinese citizenship to any child born to a Chinese parent and does not recognize dual citizenship, these children are still Chinese citizens.

Online discussions on this topic show that there are many families in China with children whose citizenship status is ambiguous. Families navigate this situation by making use of a loophole in the visa system that allows children with a “nationality conflict” to depart from China on a special People’s Republic of China Entry and Exit permit that allows these children to leave China and return within three months of the permit’s issuance (Chodorow 2016). Once abroad, parents can apply for a two-year travel permit from the Chinese immigration office that allows their children to enter and exit China multiple times. Making use of these types of workarounds, mixed-status families with access to long-term visas for spouses and the resources to travel regularly to the foreign spouse’s home country manage to live in China for a long time and with citizenship of a Western country for the foreign spouse and their children. However, when Covid-19 broke out in Wuhan and questions pertaining to evacuation drew attention to mixed families’ citizenship status, these families suddenly found themselves in trouble. The Chinese government gave permission to foreign governments to evacuate their citizens, but did not allow the evacuation of Chinese citizens, even if they were part of one family. This not only led to couples facing separation, but also threatened parents with separation from their children with dual nationality and thus ambiguous citizenship status.¹

Citizenship and white mobility capital

In migration studies, citizenship is often considered a status that migrants desire and strive for. Citizenship as a vehicle for inclusion and attaining citizenship symbolizes the end of migranthood, a period during which exclusions from citizenship shape one’s societal position. These studies often focus on migrants who move from poorer to wealthier countries either as refugees (Akcapar and Simsek 2018) or as undocumented migrants (Castañeda 2019). However, scholars have shown that citizenship is not the end goal for all migrants and argue, relatedly, that the status and identity of a border-crossing person are important for the effects that these borders have on them (Balibar 2002). Aihwa Ong, for example, shows how the overseas Chinese business elite use strategies of “flexible citizenship” to accumulate capital and power (1999, 6). In a similar vein, Catrin Lundström researches the experiences of Swedish migrant women in Spain, Singapore, and the US and argues that while the absence of citizenship rights can lead to inequality and exploitation for non-Western migrants and migrant workers, not having formal citizenship in the host country can paradoxically provide middle- and upper-class Swedish migrant women with the (trans)national capital that may allow them to return to their home country when life becomes difficult (2017). This resonates with Bridget Anderson’s study of two groups of non-UK citizens: those that enter the UK as domestic workers and also the wealthy employers they accompany. Her work shows that these two groups of migrants are affected differently by intertwined exclusionary frameworks, supporting her argument that not all non-citizens are equally excluded from societies (2010).

Scholars who work on the linkages between race and migration argue that racializing processes play a pivotal role in shaping migrants’ experiences (Lundström 2017). Erel, Murji, and Nahaboo's (2016) study on the race–migration nexus shows that migration is often used to refer to the movement of bodies of color, making race implicit in the conceptualization of migration. This point has been taken up by scholars interested in the intersection between whiteness and migration (Lundström 2014; Leonard 2016; Lan 2022b), who argue that white people in foreign countries are seen—and see themselves—as “tourists,” “guests,” “development workers,” “expatriates,” or “cosmopolitans” instead of as “migrants,” who are often imagined as being poor and pathetic (Lundström 2014). The conceptualization of white mobility by these scholars builds on ideas from the field of critical whiteness studies about whiteness as a social norm “chained to an index of unspoken privileges” and the “rubric through which many of our ideas of citizenship and human rights are written” (Nayak 2007, 738). These unspoken privileges, when mapped onto other social structures that shape inequalities, such as global hierarchies of nationality/citizenship and education systems, translate into mobility capital, which is a form of capital that makes it easier for people who possess it to cross borders, carry out their activities in different places, and return to their home countries (Moret 2020).

In this article, I employ the term white mobility capital to combine mobility capital and what Lundström referred to as white capital. This is a form of capital constituted not only by privileges derived from being perceived as white in a social location, but also by privileges backed up by strong institutions, such as having citizenship rights in countries that are highly positioned in global hierarchies of power (Lundström 2017). White mobility capital thus refers to transnational mobility privileges commonly associated with whiteness that allow people to cross borders with ease and live in foreign countries while continuing to enjoy citizenship rights in powerful countries with strong welfare states. The inapplicability of these privileges in the wake of the Covid-19 outbreak and the anxious, disappointed, and angry reactions that ensued reveal the tension between the long-standing privileged status of white Western migrants in China which has spawned their expectations of easy mobility, and the recent circumscription of this privilege, particularly for members of mixed-status families who cannot extend their own strong citizenship rights to their family members.

Research methodology

The data for this article emerged from mixed-method research carried out between July 2020 and January 2021. My interest in these evacuation stories was first prompted by the front-page stories about mixed-status families who faced separation. Having lived in China on and off since 2005, I had long been aware of the bureaucratic difficulties faced by the growing number of mixed-status families in the country. Through analyzing media reports, policy documents, forums dedicated to bureaucratic questions pertaining to mixed-status families in China, and personal blogs by members of such families, I developed an understanding of the underlying problems related to Chinese immigration policies that led to these family crises in the wake of the Covid-19 outbreak.

Due to travel restrictions the findings presented in this article are largely based on my study of online sources. However, I was able to discuss my findings with three people who have lived in China as members of mixed-status families. Moreover, in addition to having conducted online research, my analysis is also rooted in my long-term experience both in researching migration and being a migrant in China. While there are valid concerns about the trustworthiness of data collected through the Internet, scholars have argued that this type of research is valuable for studying daily processes of meaning-making that take place increasingly in online spaces (Kurtz et al. 2017). I purposefully selected cases that sparked discussions across social media platforms, enabling me to cross-check my findings in various online contexts. Having said that, it is impossible to verify the identity of commenters on social media platforms, making it difficult to differentiate between comments that express real people’s sentiments and those made by trolls who purposefully post comments to anger and divide people. Finally, my findings from non-Chinese sources are mainly based on materials from the Anglo-American social media sphere, which means that the arguments should also be understood as pertaining to Anglo-American migrants’ experiences.

I analyzed the selected content using a thematic analysis approach. After considering this material on a semantic level, I analyzed the collected data on a latent level, which means that I identified how underlying assumptions, beliefs, and ideologies shaped this corpus of writing (Braun and Clarke 2006, 84). Finally, following standard ethical guidelines for doing online research, I used only writings that were publicly available on websites that did not require logging in or community membership, and used pseudonyms instead of real names.

Case 1: Nancy

Nancy was caught completely off guard when she heard that her son could not come with her if she chose to be evacuated from Wuhan by the British authorities in the early days of the Covid-19 outbreak. On her Facebook page, where she documented her ordeal, she explained that originally she had not wanted to be evacuated yet had started to panic after hearing about children falling ill. After she contacted the foreign office to indicate that she and her son wanted to return to the UK, she received a phone call in which she was told that her son was not eligible for evacuation due to his status as a Chinese citizen. Subsequently, Nancy posted the following message on Facebook:

So just received a lovely phone call from the foreign office in London all about being evacuated from Wuhan with my 3 YEAR OLD SON. I can go with no problem, my son however can’t go as they say “nothing can be done”. However a couple of years ago the British government refused to give him a visa as he is a British Citizen by default under the Section 2(1)(a) of the immigration act 1981 and giving him a visa would IMPACT HIS HUMAN RIGHTS. How about his human right to get out of this city? He suffered from pneumonia last year and the only advice they can give is for me to leave him behind? once again, Thank you for nothing FO and Beijing embassy.

(Capitalization in original)

Soon after this message was posted, nearly every British newspaper wrote about the young mother’s predicament. The hundreds of comments that these articles received on social media ranged from messages of support for Nancy to people arguing that neither she nor her son should be brought back to England due to the risk of their importing the virus. Several people replied that if she had wanted to stay safe, she should never have moved to China; a country with a terrible human rights record “where people eat just about anything.” “You made your bed, now lie in it,” these commenters suggested.

Nancy’s message indicates that she had had previous experience with travel restrictions over her son’s citizenship status. However, she fails to explain the legality of her situation and claims to be completely shocked and outraged by the travel restrictions facing her family. In response to a person asking about the reasons for the British Foreign Office’s refusal to evacuate her son, she replies: “bureaucracy rubbish is my guess.” Commenters who try to explain the legal reasons behind this story are outnumbered by those who write about being “disgusted” by the British government’s “indifference” and tendency to “bow to the Chinese.” The reactions that support Nancy’s efforts to return home are founded on two overarching beliefs: (1) this child is a British citizen by descent, and (2) a child should never be separated from its mother. Interestingly, although this family lives in China, the position of the Chinese father is not mentioned—either as somebody who needs to be evacuated with his family for safety reasons or in terms of his separation from his child.

Nancy was not the only person in Wuhan dealing with this situation, as is shown by similar outcries online by other mixed-status families in Wuhan, involving citizens from both the US and the EU. Most cases developed along a similar line. At first, families were told that children with dual nationality could not be evacuated, as the Chinese government did not recognize their second citizenship and therefore viewed these children as Chinese nationals. After negotiations between various countries’ foreign offices and the Chinese state, the children were allowed to board the flights, but Chinese partners without foreign citizenship or permanent resident status had to stay behind. In some cases, such as Nancy’s, people chose to be evacuated although they were unable to bring their partners. In other cases, families decided to stay together in Wuhan, hoping for the best.

Case 2: Jonas

At the time of the Covid-19 outbreak, Jonas was a 26-year-old US citizen living in Wuhan with a newborn baby and a Chinese wife. In the weeks that followed, Jonas uploaded several videos to explain his family’s situation. Being afraid for his family’s health, he wanted to be evacuated, but faced problems, since neither his son nor his wife had travel documents for the US. Moreover, his son—born to a Chinese citizen in China—is also considered a Chinese citizen by the Chinese state. In his videos Jonas explains why he thinks the US government should still evacuate him and his family, evoking active online discussion:

We have always had the intention of living in America. I’ve been an American citizen my entire life. I’ve served with the Minnesota Army National Guard for five years. I’ve done plenty of stuff for my country and I love my country, and my wife loves my country too, and we just want to go get out of this stressful situation that’s causing problems. We don’t want our son to contract this disease and potentially die. And we just want a little bit of support from the government.

In this video Jonas evokes the idea that governments have a duty to care for their citizens. He emphasizes his service in the US army and his love for his country to stress his status as a US citizen. He also expresses some annoyance about the $1,000 fee that the US government charged for seats on the evacuation flight and the government’s refusal to transport partners and children without US citizenship. Jonas says: “I’ve actually been a little bit annoyed at the p–s-poor treatment. Why is it that American citizens have to pay $1,000 and not have our families come with us? It’s bulls–t.” Online commentators largely disagree with Jonas’s attitude and respond to him with anti-immigrant and anti-China sentiment:

You choose to work there, so stop your crying and bad mouthing are [sic] country.

You people made a choice to be in China & live & married a Chinese person. that [sic] is your country now. Can’t hold U S the [sic] blame for choices you made to live in that nasty Country [sic] so stay there. Don't bring your sickness to inasent [sic] people here.

what you doing in china white boy [sic]

Don’t get mad at are [sic] government. Everybody should know the risk when you leave are [sic] Country. Then think Americans o[we] you something. So pull up your big pants.²²

Jonas’s narrative and the reactions from his commenters center on questions of citizenship: who should be considered as citizens and what rights and duties should citizens have? Some people who comment on Jonas’s—and Nancy’s—stories question whether people who have left their country should continue to enjoy these rights. They argue that citizenship is not only about a person’s legal status but also about loyalty to one’s country and its people, which is broken by emigration and by marrying a person from a foreign country. The added anti-China sentiment in these comments demonstrates how rising geopolitical tensions shape the reactions to Jonas’s videos. Jonas contests that his move to China makes him less of a US citizen by declaring his love for his country and tries to stretch his citizenship status to cover not only himself, but also his wife and child. In doing so, Jonas also makes the connection between loyalty to one’s country and citizenship and argues against the interpretation of his marriage and emigration as a sign of disloyalty.

Migrants or citizens: should they stay, or should they go?

The online debate raised by the situation of families such as Nancy’s and Jonas’s in Wuhan after the Covid-19 outbreak brings to the fore the politics and gendered and racialized conceptualizations of mobility. First, in reporting on the problems pertaining to the evacuations of mixed-status families, these families were often described as being “stuck” or being “stranded.” These words suggest that families ran into unexpected mobility restrictions while passing through China, reflecting, in line with arguments put forward by scholars about migration as a racialized concept (Erel, Murji, and Nahaboo 2016; Lundström 2017), how white Western migrants who have lived in China for many years and have started families with Chinese citizens in the country, are still viewed as being in China temporarily, and not as migrants per se. This view is not only imposed by the media, but also corresponds with how Nancy and Jonas present their personal situations. Jonas, for example, emphasizes that both he and his wife “always had the intention of living in America.”

The social consequences of viewing oneself as a temporary visitor rather than a migrant can be far-reaching, as can be seen in the assumptions of white migrants in China about the citizenship of their children. Analysis of online discussions between parents and lawyers specializing in Chinese family immigration issues shows that many parents do not inform themselves about citizenship issues related to having a child in China until after their baby has already been born and they are confronted with difficulties in organizing travel documents. At that moment, when parents are confronted with Chinese citizenship laws for the first time, people learn to navigate bureaucracies in such a way that they can continue to enjoy mobility privileges associated with their citizenship and evade the restrictions imposed by the Chinese Nationality Law. These strategies reveal that Western spouses in mixed-families in China manage to pass on part of their mobility privileges to their children. However, the difficulty involved in renouncing—or, according to some parents, the near impossibility of renouncing—a child’s Chinese citizenship means that even if mobility restrictions can be circumvented, these children will continue to be Chinese citizens in the eyes of the Chinese state.

Citizenship regimes that automatically bestow citizenship based on descent are common around the world. However, what makes the Chinese state’s citizenship regime stricter than most is that it does not recognize dual citizenship status and makes it very difficult to renounce Chinese citizenship status. These policies are in line with a trend observed by race scholars in post-Mao China that pertains to rising Chinese ethnonationalism and the resurrection of the ideal of the racially-based state to promote the party-state’s nationalist agenda (Sautman 1997; Cheng 2019). Moreover, Cheng Yinghong’s (2019, 204) analysis of debates among Chinese netizens about “mixed-race children” shows how deeply entrenched racial hierarchies render black-Chinese children a threat to the Chinese race, whereas white-Chinese children are considered acceptable and “relatively superior.” Nonetheless, this form of white privilege leads to a loss of white mobility capital for children in mixed-status families who cannot live in China and claim citizenship rights in a foreign country as their foreign parent is able to do.

The shocked and angry reactions from Nancy and Jonas to their respective governments’ refusal to evacuate their partners and children reveal how these parents’ long-standing privileged status as white, Western foreigners in China has led them to expect to extend their privileges to family members. This expectation is not only based on ideas about citizenship, but also rooted in beliefs about what it means to be a family. As illustrated by the onslaught of criticism generated by disturbing images of families being forcibly separated at the Mexico-USA border during the Trump administration, the right to family life and family unity is not only written in international human rights law, but also has broad societal support. The suggestion that children could be separated from their mother was met with particular scorn on social media. In Jonas’s words, in a video where he speaks directly into the camera while holding his baby to his chest: “There’s no way on earth I would ever separate a mother and her one-month-old-baby, and I don’t know anybody who would ever do that. It seems like a stupid decision. A one-month-old baby needs their mommy.”

Despite the consensus on family separation, there was broad disagreement between commenters on these stories about whether these families should be evacuated or not. After all, these families did not need to be separated if they remained together in China. Both Nancy and Jonas received many messages along the lines that “you made your bed, now lie in it” from people who view migration to China through a political lens. In this view, shaped by the geopolitical tensions fueled by China’s rise as a global power, foreign migrants in China are considered by some as traitors for having moved to that country in the first place. Reactions of this type demonstrate how the deteriorating relationship between China and Western countries, and in particular the US, has led to the politization of migration to China, which further weakens the position of white Western migrants in the country as they lose support and sympathy of some people in their home country.

Conclusion

As the relationship between China and the world changes, the effects on migrants’ positionality in Chinese society are strongly felt. The mobility capital of migrants who have long been classified as desirable because of their language abilities and high level of education has rapidly diminished in the Covid-19 period. As it has become more difficult for families to navigate China’s stringent migration policies, the ramifications for mixed-status families in China are serious. These families face the possibility that their children’s bodies will become the site of a political struggle, as their ambiguous citizenship status may result in a decline in their mobility capital. This article has explored evacuation decisions pertaining to mixed-status families in China to bring attention to the increasingly unstable foundation of long-assumed mobility privileges among white migrants in China. With the term white mobility capital, defined as structural mobility privileges derived from citizenship status in countries with majority white populations that are positioned towards the top of global hierarchies of power, this research has highlighted how privileges associated with whiteness map onto other social structures that shape social inequalities, such as global hierarchies of nationality/citizenship and education systems. Covid-19 threw the precarious positioning of mixed-status families in China into sharp relief, yet the larger underlying trends that shape this moment, including rising geopolitical tensions and ethnonationalist sentiments, are not specific to times of pandemic. The influence of those forces on the changing position of migrants in China make for an important topic for future research.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the members of the ChinaWhite team for their support in developing this paper and to the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and inspiring comments. I also thank Carole Pearce for her writing support.

Disclosure statement

The author reports that there are no competing interests to declare.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Horizon 2020 Programme, European Research Council under grant number (CHINAWHITE) 817868.

Notes on contributors

Willy Sier

Willy Sier is an anthropologist and assistant professor at Utrecht University. She obtained her PhD degree from the University of Amsterdam in February 2020. Willy lived in China for seven years as a student and a researcher. In her work, she focuses on questions of mobility and identity through research on Chinese labor mobility and (gendered) rural–urban dynamics as well as the construction of racial identities among migrants in China. Willy has produced several short films, such as Empty Home, Happy Weekend in Wuhan, and New Year in Wuhan. Recently, her articles have appeared in Modern China, the Journal of Development Research, Gender, Place & Culture, China Information, and Pacific Affairs. Her e-mail is [email protected].

Notes

1 Decisions about evacuations after the Covid-19 outbreak were also politicized by the Chinese state. In an online press conference held on February 3, 2020, Hua Chunying, a spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry, stated that the Chinese government equates measures taken by foreign nations, such as restricting incoming travel by Chinese citizens and evacuating their citizens from China, as “a vote of no confidence in China,” with consequences for future relations with the country. These statements explain why several countries that are heavily dependent on Chinese investments, including Pakistan and almost all sub-Saharan countries, refrained from evacuating their citizens, and they are likely to have complicated negotiations on the evacuation of Chinese citizens as members of families with mixed citizenship.

2 These comments were posted in response to an article about Jonas’s situation on newsbreak.com. This website’s comment section is often filled with inflammatory content. However, the sentiments displayed in these comments are reflected in reactions to stories about the evacuation of American citizens from Wuhan on other websites, including YouTube and Facebook.