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.

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This article reflects on the emerging criminological research enterprise in China. We provide a brief overview on the nature of criminological knowledge production in China, particularly in relation to practical and political constraints. We contend that while there are distinct challenges associated with doing criminology in China, there are also new possibilities for alternative methodologies and critical analyses to push the boundaries of administrative criminology. Through the example of a study of migrants and motorcycle taxi driving in a Chinese city, we argue that an ethnography of the periphery can facilitate our understanding of the nuances of the social and cultural construction of the migrant crime problem, bringing to the foreground globally as well as locally relevant tensions, fragmented realities and hybridized identities.

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