The Covid-19 pandemic has become the largest disaster for human beings since WWII. Three months later (October 25, 2020), when the paper was revised, the infections and death had increased to 42.6 million and 1.15 million known cases. 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.Īt the time of finishing the first draft of this paper (July 16, 2020), the Covid-19 pandemic had led to over 13 million infections and over half a million deaths around the world. 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. With the number of cases outside China surpassing that in China, stigmatization was imposed by some Chinese onto Africans in China. 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. 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. The Covid-19 pandemic has given rise to stigma, discrimination, and even hate crimes against various populations in the Chinese language–speaking world.
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