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.

Keywords:

• Europeans in China
• Covid-19
• citizenship constellations
• white foreignness
• skilled migration

Introduction

Against the background of China’s rising international influence and mounting geopolitical tensions such as the US-Chinese “'trade war,” there is a conflicted international debate concerning the legitimacy of the Chinese political system in both Western and Chinese media and political and public spheres. Such debates are often framed as a competition between two different political systems — authoritarian and democratic — and have been fueled by the politicization of the Covid-19 pandemic. Its Chinese origin was frequently stressed by Western media, politicians, and other opinion-leaders — often implicitly alluding to and thereby reinforcing pre-existing anti-Chinese sentiments (Klingberg 2020). The PRC regime (e.g., Xinhua 2020), on the other hand, was quick to praise its success in containing a further spread of the virus, which it represented as an expression of the general superiority of the Chinese system (see the introduction to this special issue; Sier 2021).

At the same time, China’s transformation into the world’s second largest economy has rendered it a destination for international migrants. Recent data give a total of 900,000 foreigners working in China in 2016 (Huang and Yan 2018), and the United Nations Population Division (2012) estimates that there were over one million international migrants in mainland China in 2020. In the early reform era, foreign professionals in China consisted mainly of Western corporate expatriates and diplomats, but it has steadily diversified to include migrants who enter China on their own initiative and are hired locally by international and Chinese companies or entrepreneurs (Camenisch and Suter 2019). Their geographic origins have equally multiplied and, apart from ethnic Chinese return migrants, most foreigners now come from other East Asian countries while Westerners have become a comparably small fraction of the total. Despite this diversification, foreignness is still often conflated with whiteness and Westernness in the Chinese context (Camenisch 2022).

Westerners settling in the PRC migrate from countries with a liberal democracy to an increasingly securitized authoritarian state governed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). They remain citizens of their democratic country of origin, but also become part of China’s population and are subjected to the rule of the authoritarian Chinese regime as non-citizens. This entails a complex “citizenship constellation,” a term defined by Bauböck (2010, 848) to grasp how “the legal status and rights of migrants are determined by the laws of their country of residence and of external citizenship of the state(s) they hold.” The transnational citizenship constellation of Western immigrants to China thus spans two political systems that are commonly thought of as incommensurable and whose legitimacy is mutually contested by opponents of either model of governance, a polarization exacerbated during the Covid-19 pandemic.

As the overview of China's immigration policy in the introduction to this special issue shows, the approach to the perception and legal inclusion of foreigners by the Chinese state is highly selective. In her study of the citizenship constellations that have emerged in the wake of emigration, immigration, and re-migration across China’s borders, Ho (2020) argues that racial categorizations underpin China’s engagement with returning members of the Chinese diaspora and non-Chinese co-ethnics, both of whom are legally immigrants to China. Ho shows that the practices of inclusion put forth by the Chinese state prioritize co-ethnicity while phenotypical difference is tied to alterity. Foreigners of non-Chinese origin are perceived as “others” to the Chinese state and society due to their facial features. In her research on Russian women married to Chinese men, Barabantseva (2021, 15) accordingly finds that foreign spouses are seen as “permanent foreigners in the Chinese nation,” whereas their biracial children are considered Chinese citizens by birth.

Ho (2020, 72) furthermore argues that the “social ranking (of foreigners)” depends on their socioeconomic status and “on their ethnic and nationality backgrounds.” In the “racial hierarchy” (Lan 2016) of “yellowness,” “blackness,” and “whiteness” in China, white people do in some ways still figure high in that their general image and treatment is rather positive, which can be read as a form of continuity of global “white privilege.” At the same time, research has exposed racial prejudice against black foreigners, informed by negative stereotypes about black Africans (Lan 2016), but also a recent decline in status among white foreigners (Camenisch 2022, Farrer 2019).

Against this background, this article explores how white European foreigners in China negotiated the political and social dynamics that unfolded around the Chinese approach to containing the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. In what ways were they affected by measures enacted by Chinese authorities and by related narratives circulating in social media and the public sphere at large? How far and why did they ascribe legitimacy to these measures and narratives? What did this entail for my participants’ perception by and positioning vis-à-vis Chinese society and Chinese authorities?

This article complements existing scholarship in three ways. First, research on transnational migration and citizenship (see, for example Bauböck 2010) has tended to focus on immigration to democratic states, whereas there is a lack of attention to the reverse contexts in which subjects move from Western democracies to an authoritarian state. Second, earlier literature on regime legitimacy in China has investigated the regime support of the Chinese population at large (Chu 2013), or of specific fractions of it such as rural society (Whiting 2017), or members of the Chinese elite (Zeng 2014), while the perspective of foreigners has not yet been considered. Third, this research adds insights on citizenship constellations and whiteness to the growing scholarship on the diversifying Western migration to China (Camenisch and Suter 2019; Farrer 2019).

This article intends neither to apply a normative approach towards regime legitimacy, which would judge the extent to which the Chinese model or specific measures of Chinese authorities can be assessed as legitimate or not, nor to relativize the autocratic rule in China vis-à-vis human rights concerns. Following Gerschewski (2018, 9), I employ regime legitimacy as “a relational concept between the ruler and the ruled” (here, white Europeans in China) and I seek to understand how far “the ruled sees the entitlement claims of the ruler as being justified and follows them based on a perceived obligation to obey.”

The article consists of five parts. After elaborating on methodology in part two, the focus of part three lies in the individual experiences of the travel ban and the rising anti-foreigner sentiments that were reported in China at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and discusses how the research participants perceived their social and legal position in Chinese society, also as compared to that of black foreigners. Part four investigates the opinions expressed by the participants about China’s overall pandemic response at the time. I discuss in part five how they thereby re-inscribed themselves in the Chinese collective from which they were simultaneously excluded as potentially virus-carrying foreigners.

Methodology

This article is based on seven online interviews conducted in 2020 with one female and six male white European foreigners working in different regions and cities of China (Guangdong, Beijing and Shanghai). They were recruited from a larger sample as this short study is a follow-up on my long-term doctoral research (2013–2019) on European migrant professionals in China with 16 months of fieldwork conducted in 2014–2015 in several Chinese cities.

Six of the participants are Swiss (sometimes with a second nationality), one is Austrian, and all have phenotypical features that would usually lead to a racial categorization as “white.” They were between 31 and 61 years old at the time of the interview and had been in China from two to 19 years. All but one participant were in a relationship, two with an ethnic Chinese significant other and four with a partner from another Asian country (Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia) and all have a higher vocational training or university degree. Four are entrepreneurs with small to middle-sized China-based companies, and three are locally employed managers in European transnational corporations. The business scope of these companies include manufacturing, import and export, retail, gastronomy, and business consulting. My research participants can therefore be designated as professionally well-established white European foreigners with a long-term personal and professional connection to China.

The semi-structured interviews lasted between 45 minutes to over two hours and were conducted between July and September 2020, when many Western states were grappling with a severe first wave of the pandemic, whereas the spread of the virus had been contained in China. The interviews were transcribed and coded following the method of constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz 2006). In addition to the interview transcripts, I have collected various newspaper articles, (social) media contributions, and information from two further Swiss participants who belonged to the sample of my earlier research that were also considered in the analysis.

White foreignness becoming precarious: differentiated exclusion as the viral “other”

China's Covid-19 travel ban: reinforcing the racialized alterity of foreign “others”

In an effort to contain the spread of the new corona virus around the globe, most countries issued restrictions on international mobility (Piccoli et al. 2020). The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2020a) also announced a general entry ban for foreigners on March 26, 2020 that was still in place at the time of the interviews.

Five research participants had not yet experienced the current entry ban as a vital disruption of their social and work life, since they stayed in China during the pandemic. However, the experience of the other two Beijing-based participants provides an insight into the grave impact the travel ban had on the foreign population in China as a whole. Both were abroad when the travel ban was introduced in early 2020. At the time of the interview, Carol was staying in Switzerland with her parents and Anton at his second home in Germany, and both were prevented from returning to China. Carol, a manager of a small import and retail company in Beijing, initially thought that she would leave China only briefly for a business trip in January 2020 but became stuck overseas. She told me that the number of foreigners in Beijing had decreased by 30% since January 2020 and around half of the foreign entrepreneurs she knows were similarly stuck abroad. This estimate was roughly confirmed by another participant living in Shenzhen.

All participants felt affected by the symbolism of how China adjusted its immigration policy during the early Covid-19 pandemic. Most countries exempted foreign permanent residents, and spouses and other dependents of their own citizens, from similar measures (Piccoli et al. 2020), and thereby treated non-citizens with strong links to the country similarly to their own citizens. By international standards, the Chinese entry ban was stricter, in that it has also prevented long-term foreign residents with valid permits and those with Chinese family members from coming back to the country. As Kurt (31), a locally employed manager of a Sino-Swiss consulting firm in Shanghai and in China for over two years, realized, it not only led to very difficult situations for those directly affected but also added to their citizenship constellation a strong signal of exclusion by their country of residence:

Many foreigners who have a permanent residence, who are married to a Chinese person and have a family here did not understand why they weren’t allowed back in. …This signals, “You’re not a Chinese, it’s not enough to marry into Chinese society. You’re still not one of us.” I don’t know what it takes to be accepted, it’s probably an issue of ethnicity, I’m still figuring it out. But it’s a clear sign: “You’re not one of us.”

Kurt’s perception reflects the Chinese approach to immigration, which is highly selective and stratified along lines of class and race. How the participants experienced the Chinese immigration measures during the Covid-19 crisis points to an exposure and exacerbation of this legal precariousness in their citizenship constellation. The draconian travel ban also signaled to comparably well-established foreign long-term residents like my research participants that at a moment of crisis, notwithstanding the relative social and economic privileges they might enjoy as skilled white migrants in their daily life, they are low on the list of priorities of the Chinese state and are ultimately not considered to belong legally in China.

Negotiating Covid-19 stigma as an uptick in differential xenophobia

Becoming a subject of stigmatization: the “othering” of the virus

Marginalized and racialized social groups have often been blamed for diseases (Chamberlain 2020). After the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, people of Chinese or Asian descent became the object of severe discrimination and insults, especially in the United States and in European countries (Pham 2020). When the first wave had been contained in China and in Asia more broadly and the number of new cases started to rise rapidly in African, American, and European countries, many foreigners in China noticed an uptick in xenophobia as well, as discussed more in detail in the Introduction to this special issue.

The five participants who have lived in China during the coronavirus pandemic agreed that in their perception the general atmosphere had become more anti-foreign during this time. In the period between February and September 2020, most had been exposed to statements or actions by Chinese individuals or authorities that they understand as being triggered by their phenotypic appearance and, relatedly, as informed by xenophobia. For instance, to avoid physical proximity, Chinese people would switch to the other side of the street or leave a restaurant after having spotted one of my participants. One participant was denied access to a hotel usually open to foreigners and where he had stayed before. Kurt had the following experience:

It was in a rather provincial region close to Nanjing when we travelled for the first time [after the outbreak of the new corona virus]. We were invited by local authorities to attend an opening ceremony and then we extended our stay for one night. And there was this hot spring up on a hill with a really nice view. It was quite big, like a pool. And quite a few people were in that pool, around 15. And at first, I found the thought of joining them a bit awkward. But I did it anyway…. And it did not take two minutes until everyone else had left the pool. They all said things like “uh, it’s getting quite hot,” or “we have been inside for long enough.” Well, that might have been the case, but it was pretty obvious that they felt really uncomfortable [about being in the hot spring with him as a white foreigner].

In addition to such incidents of avoidance, some research participants also elaborated on their individual treatment by Chinese authorities and ordinary people enforcing the anti-corona measures. Even though such encounters were overall experienced as rather friendly and correct, a few participants had the impression that they were treated differently and more strictly without objective justification than were Chinese citizens in a similar situation. Paul (39), for instance, reported a rather intimidating encounter with state authorities in Guangdong in late February or early March 2020, which seems not to have been an isolated experience. He is the local manager of a Swiss company, speaks Chinese fluently, and has lived in China for 16 years. Together with his Filipina wife and their two children, he is a long-term resident of a city to the south of Guangzhou. When the pandemic broke out in January 2020, the family decided to travel to the Philippines. They returned in late February before the travel ban was put in place and subsequently had to quarantine at home:

We were paid a visit by the authorities. Seven people came in a black car with tinted windows. Some were from the police. …. They said they only wanted to check how we are doing but it was about more than that. They clearly wanted to say: “We know where you are. Don’t mess around.” That was the hidden message. Because it wasn’t necessary to come with all these people. It was disconcerting. I told the Consulate General about it, and they were not surprised at all. The had received similar reports from various sides.

By July, August and September 2020, when I conducted interviews, most participants observed that anti-foreign sentiments were slightly diminishing. Yet some found that the rise of these sentiments had nevertheless exposed a certain potential for xenophobia in parts of the population, boosted by feelings of nationalism, as well as the willingness of the authorities to exploit, or even fuel it. Kurt, for instance, mused:

It did not improve the general situation for foreigners. …. There might be a hidden racism which has become more visible. ….I do believe that it is an [ebbing] wave. Yet, there are surely enough people who have become more nationalist these past years and who now feel confirmed in their attitude.

To participants, the forms of avoidance or exclusion they experienced seemed based on a fear of being contaminated by foreigners. They assumed that this stigmatization was related to the regime’s position that it had successfully contained the internal spread of the virus, focusing on “imported” new cases to prove this point.

This stigmatization of foreigners through an externalization, racialization, and politicization of a transmissible disease is reminiscent of the initial approach of the Chinese regime to the appearance of HIV in the 1980s. Even though the first case of a Chinese person infected with HIV was registered as early as 1985, “HIV was considered a disease of ‘foreigners’ or a ‘disease of imperialism,’” and the subsequent domestic growth of the HIV epidemic was initially ignored and denied by the Chinese government (Hong et al. 2008: 830). Even in the early 2000s, “the stigma remained and news coverage … still reinforced early perceptions of HIV and AIDS as a problem linked to foreigners” (Anderson 2018, 199).

In a similar vein, information disseminated about “imported” Covid-19 cases often fueled suspicion about foreigners. While such information also circulated in Chinese (see, e.g., Van der Made 2020), an example in English is an infographic published in the Chinese Global Times (2020) titled “Imported Covid-19 cases in Guangzhou raise local transmission concerns,” which mentions positive cases from Nigeria and links them to the African community in Guangzhou. In the lower part of the graphic, the 111 imported cases reported at that time were split up according to the country where these people had come from. The way this information was framed left room for the popular perception to develop that foreigners were responsible for bringing the virus back to China, and concealed that in fact 90% of all cases listed as “imported” in late March 2020 were returning Chinese citizens (MERICS 2020).

Similarly, Paul reflected that even though Chinese returnees also became the objects of public distrust, contents representing foreigners as a pandemic threat were allowed to circulate for quite some time on otherwise tightly controlled Chinese social media platforms (see also Anonymous 2020):

I believe that if it had been about Chinese [disobeying the measures] and a foreigner had uploaded it, then it would have disappeared in no time. But because it stirs up xenophobia and nationalism, it stayed online for very long and went viral rapidly.

It seems that Chinese authorities, using social media as a tool, externalized and racialized the new corona virus to rally their own people behind them and to demonstrate the legitimacy of government action. Juxtaposing this with the authorities’ self-acclaimed success, this externalization stressed the assumed ineffectiveness of African and Western governments and societies in dealing with the outbreak – manifested in the showcasing of infected foreign bodies in China. How black and white foreigners were represented and perceived in relation to the containment of the pandemic and the spread and prevention of new infections added a layer of racialized social exclusion and stigmatization to the legal precariousness of their citizenship constellation vis-à-vis China, and can be interpreted as a way of legitimizing the pandemic policy of the Chinese regime.

Covid-19 and the differential and shifting racial hierarchy in China

Comparing their own experiences as “whites” to those of other groups of foreigners, participants also stressed that different foreigners have experienced differing and differentially disadvantageous forms of racialization, both in general and during the pandemic. They argued that the incidents of avoidance they had faced were rather subtle, unlike the blatant and long-standing racism black foreigners have been exposed to before the outbreak of the new corona virus (Cheng 2011). Manager Kurt, who had previously lived in Guangzhou as an exchange student, reflected:

What I remember from my time in Guangzhou is the difference of how foreigners are perceived. … Many people in Guangzhou come from the Middle East or Africa. And I noticed how they were treated differently from me, in a more negative way. Meaning that they are not trusted, or that people are afraid of them, purely because of their skin color.

The most severe and systematic mistreatment of foreigners in relation to anti-Covid-19 measures was reported by Africans in Guangzhou in early April 2020 after information about Nigerians evading quarantine measures, and in one case attacking a nurse, went viral on Chinese social media. The experiences of black foreigners in Guangzhou included far-reaching, highly discriminatory acts both by local authorities and members of the public. These comprised being singled out for compulsory testing and quarantine (even in case of a negative test result) as well as being evicted from their housing on the basis of their nationality and race (Leung 2020).

In this context, Roger remembered an incident which left a lasting impression on him. He is 60 years old and owns and manages a small factory for precision engineering goods in a city to the south of Guangzhou in the Pearl River Delta. He has been working in China since 2002 and has been based in the same city with his Malay wife and their two children (who are now studying in the Netherlands) since 2004. Recalling a short conversation with one of his staff, he told me:

I was in the elevator with my engineer, he’s a manager, he speaks English well. I would say that he is well educated. He pressed the button the elevator with his finger, and I said: “Don’t do that!” “Why not?” “Well, we have five floors in this building, can you imagine how many people use this elevator and press this button? That’s not good … You may infect yourself with the virus.” “No, no, that’s not a problem. There are no black people here.” “What do you mean, no black people?” “Black people have it, those in Guangzhou. We are safe here.” He had internalized this idea. That’s what he thinks and he’s not the only one. It’s safe to assume that a certain percentage of the population thinks like that.

My findings — based on the perspectives of white foreigners — illustrate the social processes that racialize foreigners as black (Africans) and as white (Westerners) and position them differently as non co-ethnic “others” from a Chinese perspective. They also expose how the “othering” of the virus has led to further movements in the racial hierarchy. Despite their relatively privileged racial position compared to black foreigners, white foreigners also had a first-hand insight into the unsettling and harmful potential of being racialized during the early phase of Covid-19 and experienced how their own social position was potentially precarious and changing.

In Guangdong, the above-described incidents and others were seen as grave enough for the 62 foreign consulates to send a joint complaint about the treatment of foreigners to the provincial government of Guangdong (as discussed by two participants). The provincial authorities never openly admitted that there had indeed been unfair treatment of Africans and other foreigners (James 2020) and even argued that the concerns raised were in a fact “a Western trap to stir enmity” (Leng and Chen 2020). However, between mid-April and May 2020, provincial authorities as well as the Foreign Ministry (2020b) issued several statements condemning all forms of discrimination and racism and introduced anti-discrimination measures, in particular for the African community.

This moment of crisis and heightened instability of the pandemic not only abetted the precariousness of the legal and social status informing the citizenship constellation of white foreigners in China but also exposed the social differences inherent in the racial hierarchy in China. It seems to have raised my research participants’ awareness for the much more intense racism and negative stereotyping black foreigners in China are facing. This created a novel sense of a shared experience of racialization and stigmatization with those conceived as being “of color” among some white foreigners. Such reflections, and the letter of complaint signed by all the foreign consulates in Guangzhou, signaled a joint contestation of the practices of the local authorities, and a flicker of solidarity between these historically very separate and socio-economically disparate groups of differently racialized foreigners in China.

Praise and compliance: Identifying with the “safest country on earth”

Nevertheless, when asked about their general impression of how Chinese authorities and the Chinese people have coped with the outbreak of the new corona virus, participants agreed in considering the Chinese response to the spread of the corona virus at the time an overall success After the initial coverup of the outbreak in Wuhan, they by and large experienced the various regionally adapted policies as efficient and effective. In comparison, they perceived the measures in Switzerland and other Western countries as rather ineffective, hesitant, and slow, expressed by Roger as follows: “Even though it originated in China, they were better at containing the new corona virus than other countries.”

An even more positive assessment was made by entrepreneur Hugo, based in Shenzhen with his Chinese wife and the couple’s daughter. He stressed that in contrast to widespread views in Europe, the Chinese population was not subjected to more draconian measures during the first wave, except in certain hotspots and Wuhan in particular. In Guangdong, he pointed out, there had never been a lockdown as far-reaching as in many European countries up to the time of the interview and accordingly, individual freedom of movement and economic life was less restricted, and he emphasized his strong feeling of security in his country of residence: “China is today the safest country on earth to live in in terms of the pandemic. We have our normal life back, one could say.”

In line with the comparative perspective of my participants for assessing the legitimacy of the pandemic measures in China, they questioned critical attitudes towards government action, towards the wearing of masks and the emphasis on the protection of individual privacy prevailing in European societies. As Roger stated:

There are differences between China and Switzerland; in China, the acceptance of state power is much higher than in Switzerland …. Culturally speaking, we Swiss are a little out of step. We always have the feeling that we know everything better and we don't let anyone tell us anything, we don't let the government decide what our life should look like. But we must have someone who tells us so that we can keep on living [in the corona crisis].

Musing about the origin of these differing attitudes, participants juxtaposed Chinese and Western understandings of the relationship between the individual and society, as elaborated by Paul: “In Europe, in the West, we have placed individual freedom above everything else during the last 50 years. … Here, the common good, be it in the family or beyond, still comes first.”

All research participants expressed their respect not only for the way in which authorities fought the pandemic but also for how well the population had complied with their measures. Uwe described his own attitude – represented as the one prevalent in China — to the government measures:

Well, that’s the deal here. The discipline regarding the wearing of masks is extremely high. I wear a mask in my office every day, all day long. Everyone does it and no one complains. And one’s digital transparency, the willingness to share one’s digital profile about one’s movements, is also very high. There are no discussions about it.

The narratives of these Western foreigners thus reflect the larger geo-political tensions inherent in their citizenship constellation and politicized discussions of authoritarian and democratic regimes’ capacity to address the challenge of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is interesting to note how the participants thereby framed the relationship between the Chinese government and the population – including themselves as foreign residents – at the time of the interviews not as an enforced subordination of the individual to an authoritarian state but as a largely fair and protective arrangement in which the compliance of the broader public was rewarded with a largely undisturbed everyday and professional life.

Conclusion

This article has analyzed how white European foreigners in China have navigated issues related to their citizenship in the early Covid-19 era. On the one hand, participants criticize the “othering” of the virus as non-Chinese as xenophobic propaganda designed to strengthen Chinese nationalism. In official and officially-endorsed narratives, the corona virus was racialized and mainly attributed to black and white foreigners in spring 2020. In research participants’ experience, many Chinese responded to this narrative by perceiving foreigners as potential viral threats and thus reacted with fear and avoidance when encountering them. How the new corona virus was “othered” and ascribed to black and white bodies in the Chinese media and public space reflects the changing and stratified racial hierarchy in China. White foreigners experienced forms of discrimination, but apparently in much subtler ways than black foreigners. These insights triggered reflections on uneven modes of racialization in China, creating a heightened sense of exclusion and precariousness among the interviewed Western foreigners and leading to greater awareness of the situation of black foreigners.

On the other hand, these participants by and large acknowledged the capacity of the Chinese state, and supported and thus legitimized the drastic measures of the Chinese authorities to contain Covid-19 at the time. What is more, they praised the population in China — and themselves — for their compliance with state measures. A will to conform for the benefit of the common good is at once both adopted to some extent in my participants' narratives and at the same time understood as stemming from culturally embedded differences in the importance attributed to individual and collective well-being in Western societies and in China. To some extent, when defining their position vis-à-vis their country of residence, they engaged in an identification with their Chinese context, as they held that “we” (the state and the population) in China were mastering the corona crisis better than “you” (the authorities and the populations) in Western countries.

The citizenship constellations of these white European foreigners in China are thus marked by a polarization between the seemingly incommensurable approaches to governance of their countries of origin and residence, and an ambiguous sense of being excluded as potentially virus-carrying foreigners and participating in China's successful pandemic response. How they navigated China’s pandemic policy and their social position in China tends to deviate from the standard “Western” perspective on the legitimacy of the China model. Yet, their position as white European foreigners in China in the early Covid-19 period was marked by an imposed alterity, although they also exercised some claims of belonging, and thus fraternity with China. It seems that the pandemic has exacerbated the loss of certain privileges hitherto tied to white foreignness and deepened the fissures that run through the tension-laden citizenship constellations of Western residents in China, but has also opened new possibilities for nurturing and enacting a sense of membership and practicing more strongly embedded ways of being a white foreigner in China.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Horizon 2020 Programme, European Research Council (CHINAWHITE 817868).

Notes on contributors

Aldina Camenisch

Aldina Camenisch is an associate postdoctoral researcher in Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and the Administrative Director of the National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) for migration and mobility studies at the University of Neuchâtel. Her special interests revolve around the (re-)negotiation of social and economic positions of Western migrants in non-Western contexts against current shifts in global power hierarchies and changing processes of racialization. Her research in the ChinaWhite project explores how European professionals in China navigate the Covid-19 crisis economically, socially and politically. She has published articles in Ethnicities, Transitions: Journal of Transient Migration, and International Migration.