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.
Existing literature has highlighted the importance of recognizing health fraud offenders’ intentional manipulations of victims’ vulnerabilities. However, the manipulation tactics of health fraud have received little attention. This study aims to extend the current understanding of health fraud by incorporating the concept of emotional labour. Nested in the Chinese context, which owns the most populous ageing population, three sets of qualitative data were collected, including 13 semi-structured interviews, 233 judicial documents, and 197 media reports. The findings suggest that health fraud offenders utilized three types of emotional labour as means of committing crime: including the labour of anxiety relief, the labour of filial piety, and the labour of social networking. This article not only provides novel insights into understanding health fraud, but also contributes to introducing the concept of emotional labour in criminological and socio-legal studies.
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