Introduction
The case of Chinese pandemic nationalism
The academic community has widely taken notice of the “pandemic nationalism” (Yeophantong and Shih, Reference Yeophantong and Shih2021) or “bio-political nationalism” (de Kloet et al., Reference de Kloet, Lin and Chow2020) by which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) made use of the COVID-19 pandemic to consolidate its authoritarian governance in Mainland China. Firstly, state control was justified as necessary for stringent containment, while the people were interpolated as vulnerable, in need of protection and monitoring, and part of the virus-fighting machinery. The efficiency of the socialist system with Chinese characteristics in reducing casualties of the pandemic, especially vis-à-vis the “inefficient West,” was hailed as the success of China (Zhang and Jamali, Reference Zhang and Jamali2022) by state-sponsored media in China and overseas (Chen et al., Reference Chen, Lu, Chen and Ng2024). It has also been observed that vaccine diplomacy was an important device for the CCP to increase its global influence amid the “vaccine vacuum” (The Economist, 2021) as little was provided by the developed world through COVAX, a global vaccine-sharing initiative set forth in the first year of the pandemic. It is suggested that the distribution of Chinese vaccines to more than 100 countries was followed by the Chinese state media’s effort to discredit Western vaccines and highlight the successes of Chinese vaccines as “vaccine nationalism” (Chester and Shih, Reference Chester and Shih2024). Such a bid for global technological leadership through vaccine and digital disease control has also been seen as a development in the Chinese “techno-nationalism” (Bilgin and Loh, Reference Bilgin and Loh2021; Chan and Lee, Reference Chan and Lee2024). This paper examines how other Sinophone countries in the Asian-pacific regions, namely Taiwan and Hong Kong, were reacting to the Chinese influence in the context of COVID-19 pandemic has already provided a pretext for the Chinese government’s nationalist agenda of integrating other territories in the Greater China (Woods et al., Reference Woods, Schertzer, Greenfeld, Hughes and Miller-Idriss2020). While there are also two Sinophone countries in the region, namely Singapore and Macau, identity issues are way less important in shaping the political cleavage in these two locales for their apolitical setting (Lawson, Reference Lawson2001; Lou and Tang, Reference Lou and Tang2023). In this paper, we will focus on Taiwan and Hong Kong, where political mobilization is largely set around the hybrid identity of Chinese and Taiwanese/Hong-Kongese, as unpacked in the following discussion.
Taiwan is an island separated from China by the Taiwan Strait and a former Japanese colony (1895–1945), mainly consisting of ethnic Han Chinese (Hoklo). The island has been a de facto self-governed territory since the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) retreated to the island upon its defeat at the hands of the CCP in the Chinese civil war in 1949. Political and military tension arose across the strait from time to time, as Mainland China has always been insistent in its claims to sovereignty over Taiwan. Also consisting predominantly of Han Chinese immigrants (Cantonese), Hong Kong is a former British colony (1841–1997) handed over back to Mainland China as a special administrative region (SAR) in 1997 and has undergone vastly different processes of national identity-making since then. Yet, similar to Taiwan, her population is largely localized after years of separation from Mainland China, with the locally born generations overtaking the earlier generations of Chinese immigrants that may be more inclined to align with the Greater China identity.
The ongoing conflict between Chinese nationalism and the Taiwanese and Hong-Kongese represents an unneglectable factor in the study of political attitudes in Greater China. This paper focuses specifically on how the identity issues in question were shaping vaccine politics and diplomacy (i.e., whether to opt for Chinese homegrown vaccines) in response to COVID-19, divergence in containment strategies (“living with the virus” vs “COVID-zero”), and the reshaping of identities and citizenship amid these controversial policy decisions.
Literature on nationalism and citizenship discourse during COVID-19
The theoretical concept of imaginary citizenship (Anderson, Reference Anderson1983) by which we review the politics and policy of COVID-19 pertains to the responsibility of modern nation-state governments to protect the health and welfare of their populations under the Westphalian system. In times of national crises, sovereigntist movements often emerge and are centered on collective images of the idealized sovereign people, whose interests must be defended and represented. Historically, border closures were used to guard against perceived external threats, often targeting groups seen as “others.” The term “quarantine” itself originates from the ban of travelers and commerce following Black Death (1347–1351) in medieval and early modern cities; “Spanish flu” was named as such by the Americans despite its origin of Kansas (Kraut, Reference Kraut2010). Exclusionary nationalism has also been fueled often with medicalized prejudice and nativist sentiments that justified limiting immigrants who were often seen as carriers of disease in human history (Barry, Reference Barry2004).
In this connection, scholars of nationalism have observed an “ethno-nationalist reframing” (Jenne, Reference Jenne2022) in citizenship discourse during COVID-19 pandemic. Liah Greenfeld projects that “it was transnational institutions, rather than the nation-state, that were likely to fall victim to the pandemic,” (Woods et al., Reference Woods, Schertzer, Greenfeld, Hughes and Miller-Idriss2020: 813). In particular, Bieber (Reference Bieber2020) outlines four ways that the trajectory of nationalism was shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic, namely 1) “the rise of authoritarianism as governments suspend or reduce democratic freedoms and civil liberties,” 2) “the rise of biases against some groups associated with the pandemic,” 3) “the rise of borders and deglobalization,” and 4) “the politics of fear.”
However, Berrocal et al. (Reference Berrocal, Kranert and Attolino2021) argue that the pandemic aroused both exclusionary nationalistic and inclusionary responses of solidarity, with the virus being framed by nation governments as the primary out-group, and “nation-as-a-team” as the central in-group. They conceptualize four types of solidarity, namely 1) vertical solidarity rooted in national identity and aligned with government directives; 2) exclusionary solidarity against those who break rules; 3) horizontal solidarity that spans generations and family units; and 4) transnational solidarity. The global community was thus constructed as a significant affiliated group, deemed necessary for collective action against the out-group – the virus. Berrocal and colleagues suggest that while there was a strong consensus in defining the out-group, the constructions of in-groups and their affiliates varied more significantly, reflecting different discursive practices and social contexts across countries.
This paper capitalizes on the unique geo-political landscapes in the two Sino-phone countries of Taiwan and Hong Kong, as the Chinese identity inherited from earlier generations of migrants from China has been increasingly contested by their both global and national citizenship building in recent decades. Our special attention is given to how the policies of COVID-19 were shaping and shaped by the politics set around citizenship and identity, the process of redefining in-groups in the respective imagined political community of Taiwan and Hong Kong at different levels of locus.
Methodological note: comparative historical narrative approach
This study employs a comparative historical narrative approach to analyze Taiwan and Hong Kong’s pandemic responses as historically situated events constructed through publicly available discourses. The method interprets known social facts – government statements, media reports, and survey findings – as evidence of how each society made sense of the pandemic through national and civic identities. Interpretive political science views social reality as constituted by narratives and symbols rather than fixed variables. In this tradition, case studies are treated as stories grounded in historical evidence – open to interpretation but anchored in widely recognized facts. Description, therefore, is not a pre-theoretical stage but a legitimate analytical act (Gerring, Reference Gerring2012). Rather than testing hypotheses, the study follows an interpretive logic that seeks understanding through meaning reconstruction (Geertz, Reference Geertz1973; Bevir and Rhodes, Reference Bevir and Rhodes2005). We assembled a corpus of publicly accessible materials that includes: 1) government press releases, pandemic policy statements, and vaccine diplomacy announcements; 2) media reports and opinion editorials from major local and international outlets; and survey data on vaccine preference, political trust, and national identity collected during the pandemic period.
Each case was analyzed through iterative reading of public materials to trace evolving storylines – policy framing, media debates, and symbolic acts – around pandemic nationalism and citizenship. This process draws on abductive reasoning (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, Reference Schwartz-Shea and Yanow2012), moving between theoretical concepts and emerging empirical patterns. Analysis proceeded in three stages: (1) within-case narrative reconstruction, tracing key discursive shifts and events in each locale; (2) identification of symbolic markers and identity claims (e.g. vaccine choices, border control); and (3) comparative interpretation of how these narratives diverged or converged in response to Chinese influence and domestic politics. As Bevir and Rhodes (Reference Bevir and Rhodes2006) note, interpretive rigor rests on coherence, reflexivity, and plausibility. While formal techniques such as content or discourse coding are valuable, our objective is to reconstruct how events were publicly understood, not to quantify text patterns.
The comparative design follows a “most-similar systems” logic (Gerring, Reference Gerring2007), contrasting two culturally related yet politically divergent societies. Triangulation of government records, mainstream media, and survey data ensures interpretive credibility and contextual depth. By comparing these historically specific narratives, the study illuminates how citizenship and national belonging were discursively redefined amid the pandemic – demonstrating that historical narrative reconstruction can serve as a rigorous form of interpretive social inquiry (Somers and Gibson, Reference Somers, Gibson and Calhoun1994; Bevir and Rhodes, Reference Bevir and Rhodes2016).
The making of Taiwan’s global and national citizenship
Historical background
While self-governing, Taiwan is a claimed territory of Mainland China and excluded from major international organizations, including WHO, for its non-sovereign status. This ambiguity can be traced back to the Chinese civil war in 1949. Soon after China ended the Japanese rule and restored its governance in Taiwan after WWII, the KMT, the original ruling party of China, lost the civil war to the CCP and retreated to the island. It is estimated that more than 1.2 million Mainland Chinese moved to Taiwan in the post-war decades, comprising 15–20% of its population and the majority of senior officials of the KMT military government on the island (Yeh, Reference Yeh2021). Chinese nationalist education was implemented in Taiwan throughout the postwar decades by a KMT government that insisted on its status as the legitimate government of China as the Republic of China (ROC). Since the People’s Republic of China (PRC, established by the CCP in 1949) replaced the ROC as the representative of China in the UN in 1971, the self-proclaimed status as “the legitimate Chinese government in exile” has been increasingly unrealistic and downplayed as the “ROC as Taiwan.”
With the declining Chinese identity and growing demand for independence from a more locally born and identified population, Taiwan was democratized in 1991 and saw for the first time a transition of power to the KMT’s rival, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which pledged to represent the local Hoklo population in the 2000 general election. KMT subsequently found its power waning in 2008 and 2016, and thus began to adopt a relatively friendly approach to the cross-strait relationship in view of the rapidly growing Chinese market and investment. While anti-Communist, the KMT embraced the Chinese identity and rejected the idea of Taiwan independence. The fear of Chinese supremacy on the island as a result of further economic integration under the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement (CSSTA) proposed by the KMT, however, triggered the younger generations’ anti-Chinese sentiment and led to a massive protest known as the Sunflower Movement in 2014. The DDP reclaimed office in the subsequent 2016 general election and President Tsai Ying-wen was re-elected in 2020, thanks partly to the failure of “one country two systems” in Hong Kong, as evidenced by the 2019 protests against Chinese dominance in the former British colony after its handover to China in 1997. Yet it is worth noticing that the KMT has still received substantial popular support with nearly 40% of the votes in general elections and has remained the largest party in local governments at the time of writing (2022 local elections and 2024 general election) since 2014.
The politics of Chinese identification plays an important role here in the building of citizenship in Taiwan. We propose a three-level framework to grasp the dynamics setting around the debate over the positioning of Taiwan within the Asia-Pacific region: The first discourse features a strong Taiwanese identity that stresses the sense of attachment and belonging to Taiwan; the second focuses more on the regional identity as a part of the greater China or Sino-phone world; the third links to a global identity with an emphasis on Taiwan’s status as a member of the global village.
As the following sections unfold, all three of these discourses of citizenship undoubtedly shaped Taiwan’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The national one entailed Taiwanese nationalism and used this as justification for strict border control and the ruling DDP government’s efforts to develop homegrown vaccines in the early stages of the pandemic. The regional one echoed Chinese nationalism, endorsing the KMT’s encouragement for the ruling DPP government to import Chinese vaccines to fill the vaccine vacuum. The Super-national discourse, on the other hand, worked hand in hand with its national counterpart as an antithesis of Chinese nationalism, underlying Taiwan’s diplomatic endeavor to extend its international space by donating medical equipment overseas when it was largely unaffected by the pandemic in 2020 (known as “Taiwan can help”) and participating in WHO meetings.
From poster child of “COVID-zero” to “living with virus”
On December 31, 2019, a Taiwan Center for Disease Control (CDC) medical officer encountered an online post including a screenshot of written communication exchanged among healthcare workers in Wuhan City, China, regarding an outbreak of viral pneumonia. The Taiwan CDC then immediately contacted the WHO and China to verify the validity of the claim. The next day, onboard quarantine was required for travelers from Wuhan, making Taiwan the first nation worldwide to implement COVID-related border control measures, even before Wuhan’s lockdown and the Chinese government’s official statement to identify the epidemic. Similarly, Taiwan was one of the first countries to prohibit the exportation of surgical masks and enforce stringent contact tracing, personal hygiene, and social restriction measures in early 2020.
Given its previous experience in 2003, when severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) led to the deaths of dozens in Taiwan after it had spread from southern China, Taiwan had already learnt the experience of the SARS epidemic this time when facing COVID-19 – “to be very sceptical with data from China” (Yun, Reference Yun2020), and China indeed came under fire for delays in its reporting to the WHO on SARS-related matter. Such an approach to early containment of the disease was rooted in a longstanding distrust in China on the part of the ruling DDP government (Liu, Reference Lo and Liu2024). International opinion polls in late 2020 echoed that sentiment in Taiwan, as unfavorable views of China reached historic highs in many countries for its poor handling of the COVID-19 outbreak (Silver et al., Reference Silver, Devlin and Huang2020). Such a deep distrust in China had served to defend the DDP’s skeptical stand on the KMT’s agenda of further economic and social integration with China, i.e. justifying the economic loss due to the suspension of Chinese tourists by the Chinese authorities in 2019. Also, it should be noted that Taiwanese media, especially those pro-DDP, were one of the few, together with the most radical press outlets in the US, referring to the pandemic as “Wuhan coronavirus” even after COVID-19 was formally named by the WHO (Ruiz Casado, Reference Ruiz Casado2021).
With its “COVID-Zero” strategy, Taiwan was able to withstand an Alpha strain outbreak and another of Delta in 2021 without any of the lockdown measures that had been seen in China, maintaining some of the lowest global case rates throughout the pandemic, while Western countries were struggling furiously to contain the disease (Steinbrook, Reference Steinbrook2021). Such achievements were celebrated widely by Western media outlets as a successful story fighting against COVID-19 (Soon, Reference Soon2021; Hollingsworth, Reference Hollingsworth2021; Hale, Reference Hale2022), with the Taiwan government itself being lauded for its “Taiwan model of combating COVID-19” that the international community could learn from (Ministry of Health and Welfare, Taiwan, 2021). In a local survey, Taiwan citizens ranked the transparency and performance of the Taiwan government in handling the pandemic much higher than China, the US, and even the WHO (Wu, Reference Wu2021). COVID-19 seemed to serve as validation of the need to lock China out and the autonomy of the island country to quickly decouple from the outside world as necessary.
As part of the “Taiwan model of combating COVID-19,” the Covid-Zero was praised by the Taiwan government as a success, boosting its national pride and cohesion.
Up until now, life has remained normal in Taiwan. Students have continued to attend school, and people have continued to go to work and travel. “Solidarity” has been the key to Taiwan’s success against COVID-19. Each of the 23.6 million people has helped contribute to that success.
(Ministry of Health and Welfare, Taiwan, 2021: 11)
Interestingly, until mid-2022, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China remained the final three major economies continuing to adhere to zero-COVID approach. In Hong Kong, the policy was unsuccessful as the Omicron variant took a massive toll in March 2022, infecting 25% of the population and killing more than 10,000 people (ibid). In China, the steadfast commitment to such a policy took the form of taxing lockdowns for both citizens and the economy, especially in Shanghai, where the situation ultimately led to widespread protests in the country in late 2022 (known as the A4 Movement). Taiwan appeared to forego both of these approaches, opting instead for its own approach (the “new Taiwanese model”), which essentially served as an acknowledgment that while it may be impossible to entirely stop Omicron’s spread, they could at least make an effort to adopt adequate measure to prevent an overwhelming impact on the healthcare system and avoid Omicron case numbers peaking (De Guzman, Reference De Guzman2022).
Carefully, the Taiwan government implemented a gradual phasing out of social distancing and border control measures in the second half of 2022 without an immediate policy statement to live with the virus. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the ruling DDP was heavily attacked by the opposing KMT regarding the new model, and its approval ratings declined sharply following the surge of COVID cases (Wu and Hetherington, Reference Wu and Hetherington2021). The apology provided by the DDP government articulated the message that Taiwan must reopen its borders before it can reconnect to the world and return to a semblance of normalcy already restored in a number of other developed countries (Reuters, Reference Reuters2022).
While the vision of positioning Taiwan shifted from a nationalist discourse to a global one, its nature remained as an antithesis to the Chinese nationalism that primarily defines Taiwan as part of Greater China. As Yu (Reference Yu2024) observed, the shared experience of external oppression and ongoing tensions linked to the “China threat” significantly fueled Taiwanese nationalism, both politically and spatially emphasizing the divide between Taiwanese and Chinese identities. This nationalism established a clear dichotomy of a positive “us” versus a negative “them,” defined by factors such as health status, nationality, and geographic location. As a result, it formed what Purnell (Reference Purnell2021) describes as an “atmospheric wall,” enforcing political and spatial separation and creating exclusive “safe zones” or “bubbles” accessible only to specific groups. Meanwhile, on the international stage, the DPP government leveraged its effective public health management to bolster Taiwan’s national image, increase its participation in global affairs, and assert its sovereignty as distinct from China (Rowen, Reference Rowen2020). Such a complex of national and global citizenship discourses saw Taiwan as either itself, independently and uniquely, or part of the macro world order beyond Greater China.
Taiwanese vaccine politics
A second arena of the pandemic nationalism of Taiwan vis-à-vis the Chinese can be observed in the DDP government’s endeavor to develop its homegrown vaccines. In contrast to Hong Kong, where the Chinese homegrown vaccines Sinovac were imported to fill the vaccine vacuum in early 2021, Taiwan banned them on safety grounds, claiming that the offer by the Chinese authorities was part of their “united front work” that aimed to win support over the Taiwanese people (Lu, Reference Lu2021). When the DDP government sought access to imported vaccines, the Chinese pharmaceutical company Fosun, whose medical branch had an agreement with BioNTech and Pfizer Inc. regarding their COVID-19 vaccine, said the company “has the responsibility, duty and willingness to offer the best vaccine to the Greater China region, including Taiwan.” (Bloomberg, Reference Bloomberg2021) The DDP government criticized the Greater China framework for vaccine distribution as ridiculous, as it dishonored Taiwan’s claimed sovereignty (i.e. referring to the “Taiwan region,” the preferred term by which the Chinese government refers to the island in order to reinforce its sovereignty claims rather than concede a framing of Taiwan as a separate country). The DDP government said it’s talking with BioNTech rather than Fosun and the deal finally collapsed.
The shortage of vaccines put the DDP government into an embarrassing position – While it had denied any assistance from China, there were not enough vaccines ready when Taiwan suffered its first community outbreak of COVID-19 in May 2021. After President Tsai Ing-wen made accusations against China, claiming that it blocked the agreement which the Taiwanese government had made with BioNTech, the US and Japan to donate more than 8 million doses of vaccines to the island in 2021 (Lee and Blanchard, Reference Lee and Blanchard2021). The diplomatic gesture of democratic countries served to buy some time for the DDP government, but it was finally forced to accept the idea of a private sector purchase from Fosun, as proposed by a KMT affiliated business tycoon, Terry Gou, to meet partially the pressing need for vaccines while circumventing issues arising from the status of the Taiwan government when dealing with Fosun (Hioe, Reference Hioe2021).
Indeed, the DDP government had launched a homegrown vaccine program managed by the Taiwan-based pharmaceutical company Medigen Vaccine Biologics Corporation (MVC) in collaboration with the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), soon after the pandemic in February 2020. The delay in the arrival of the MVC vaccine, however, left Taiwan no choice but to immediate accept foreign and private donations during the mid-2021 outbreak as aforementioned, discrediting the DDP government (Wu and Hetherington, Reference Wu and Hetherington2021). The DDP government, in turn, sped up the emergency use authorization (EUA) of the MVC vaccine, approving its use in Taiwan in July 2021 even before the completion of phase-three trials.
The identity issue of Chinese nationalism here yet again shaped the politics of the vaccine. As a public show of support for the homegrown vaccines, President Tsai herself and senior officials became the first to receive the MVC vaccine before its rollout in Taiwan in August 2021, praising its homegrown vaccine as a key factor in the success of Taiwan in fighting COVID-19 (Ministry of Health and Welfare, Taiwan, 2022). Amid the reluctant private purchase of BNT vaccines from the Chinese-based Fosun, several DDP politicians made the accusation that the BNT vaccines were not in fact made in Germany, but manufactured in China. On yet another front, the KMT attacked the DDP’s vaccine policy, echoing the Chinese state-run tabloid Global Times’s blaming of Tsai’s party for having “politicized the pandemic” in refusing vaccines made in or distributed by China (Kuo and Chen, Reference Kuo and Chen2021). There is evidence of the influence of CCP in the cognitive and information warfare in the form of disinformation and pro-Chinese media and politicians targeted at Taiwan public’s trust in the Democratic DPP government and its home-grown vaccine (Yu and Ho, Reference Yu and Ho2022).
A local study suggests partisanship did, in fact affect Taiwanese people’s perception of the vaccine, as pro-China KMT voters rated the MVC vaccine more negatively, while pro-independence DDP voters rated it more positively. Regarding preference for vaccine, KMT voters were more inclined to receive the BNT vaccine, whereas DDP voters were more inclined to Moderna, despite the bipartisan recognition for Moderna’s effectiveness (Zhang et al., Reference Zhang, Tseng and Huang2021). A possible explanation is that BNT vaccine was symbolized as Chinese-affiliated and Moderna its US counterpart. While it is observed that very few Taiwanese actually received the MVC vaccines when BNT, Moderna, and AZ vaccines were widely available in Taiwan in 2022, efforts to develop homegrown vaccines were still justified as necessary to ensure the self-sufficiency of the island country in view of the Chinese diplomatic pressure to isolate Taiwan from the WHO (Radio Taiwan International, 2021). Indeed, another survey found that those who identified themselves as Taiwanese and who trust the government prefer MVC over BNT vaccines. Those who trusted the government were more likely to prefer and receive the MVC vaccines (Kuo and Yu, Reference Kuo and Yu2024).
Western literature has well documented the effects of partisanship and trust in authorities (Lin et al., Reference Lin, Tu and Beitsch2020) on the politics of vaccines, but mainly in terms of vaccine hesitancy. Such factors are also relevant to vaccine hesitancy in Taiwan, as a local rapid qualitative research reveals (Kuan, Reference Kuan2021). Yet the politics of vaccine here seems to concern some broader issues of national identity vis-a-vis Chinese nationalism and the perception of homegrown vaccine in the geo-political context of Sinophone countries.
Pandemic diplomacy and nationalism
COVID-19 also reshaped the international space for Taiwan in the face of its non-sovereign status in the eyes of the WHO. As the Health and Welfare Minister of Taiwan pledged, Taiwan sought to play its role in the World Health Assembly “in a professional and pragmatic manner so that it can make contributions as part of the global effort to realize WHO’s vision of a seamless global disease prevention network” (Chen, Reference Chen2022). Its major ally, the US, called for Taiwan to be allowed at the Assembly with “the world’s leading experts in combating this disease” and “outstanding control of COVID-19,” arguing that “its donations of PPE demonstrate its strong contribution to global health” (Wainer, Reference Wainer2021). The call was backed by Japan and the EU (Van der Wees, Reference Van der Wees2021).
Admittedly, the deepening of formal relationships between Taiwan and the democratic countries was set against the wider background of the latter’s decoupling from China, especially after China’s assertive actions in the South China Sea and Hong Kong. As the US State Department stated soon after Nicaragua switched its diplomatic ties from Taipei to Beijing in December 2021 –
Taiwan’s relationships with diplomatic partners in the Western Hemisphere provide significant economic and security benefits to the citizens of those countries. We encourage all countries that value democratic institutions, transparency, the rule of law, and promoting economic prosperity for their citizens to expand engagement with Taiwan.
(Price, Reference Price2021)
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 further added fuel to the fire of the newly emerging New Cold War, alerting the democratic countries to the increasing threat of the Chinese invasion of Taiwan. A number of senior politicians from the US and EU visited the island to show support, among whom the US Senate Speaker Nancy Pelosi most angered Beijing and triggered a massive Chinese military exercise around Taiwan.
Amid such changes in the regional as well as global geo-politics, the DDP government leveraged COVID-19 by promoting Taiwan’s image as a helping member in the international community with a campaign titled “Taiwan can help; health for all,”–
Taiwan is an indispensable partner in ensuring a successful post-pandemic recovery. To contain the pandemic, Taiwan has cooperated with other countries on the research and development of COVID-19 vaccines and drugs and has donated medical supplies, such as medical masks and medicines, to countries in need. This has demonstrated that Taiwan can help, and Taiwan is helping.
(Ministry of Health and Welfare, Taiwan, 2021)
It is suggested that there is a correlation between Taiwan’s “warm power” diplomacy and the prioritizing of nations to receive the aid (Sung, Reference Sung2020) as the countries receiving the assistance can be roughly broken into three categories, namely the so-called “like-minded democracies” in the North Atlantic which espouse liberal democratic values similar to those of Taiwan, to its 15 diplomatic allies which often express support for Taiwan to reciprocate Taiwan’s goodwill gestures; and to those developing nations which have suffered greatly from the pandemic as gesture of international goodwill.
In addition, Taiwan’s generally effective approach to crisis management during the COVID-19 crisis presented a compelling case in defense of the argument that liberal democracies may tend to outperform other models of governance in terms of public health crisis management, an argument that did not resonate with the Chinese nationalist discourse that favored strong social control. Once the second-largest global producer of face masks in 2020, when the global supply chain was dysfunctional, and being able to export the best practice of Covid containment, the DDP government gained international publicity that in turn served to reassure its policy of Taiwan’s self-reliance (Jao, Reference Jao2020). As Ong and Chen (Reference Ong and Chen2010) have also argued, biotech development has been central to the nation-building of East Asian post-colonial countries such as Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan, driven by the imagination of catching up with western modern science. The Taiwanese bio-politics of COVID-19 are no exception.
It is also worth noticing how the civic society participated in the construction of the citizenship discourse. Resonating the government’s international publicity, a group of overseas Taiwanese published a full-page advertisement in the New York Times and established a website “Taiwan Can Help” in the US, pleading that “In a time of isolation, we choose solidarity…We might not be a member of the WHO, but we are a member of the world.” (Taiwan Can Help Team, 2021) At the same time, when beating the mid-2021 outbreak became a point of pride in Taiwan, a series of memes began to appear on social media vowing to quickly overcome the sudden surge of cases – “Look world, Taiwan will only show you once how to remove a Level 3 alert in two weeks” – read one popular meme following the lifting of Level 3 pandemic restrictions, the final level before a full lockdown (Zennie and Tsai, Reference Zennie and Tsai2021). The imagination of Taiwan’s international citizenship by its people and government here was not at odds with the nationalist framing, which emphasized how Taiwan stood out from the crowd in the fight against COVID as a leading developed society. Rather, they represented two sides of the same coin of the deep-rooted anxiety of being isolated by and denied its autonomy from China (Rowen, Reference Rowen2020).
The making of Hong Kong’s global and national citizenship
Historical background
As a special administrative region under Chinese sovereignty after 1997, Hong Kong has also undergone a process of decolonization and Chinese national identity-making. The rise of Hong-Kongese identity against the Chinese national identity and the separatist movement in Hong Kong since the 2010s is thus equally remarkable.
While the majority of Hong Kong residents are descended from Han Chinese migrants from mainland China (mainly Canton Province), there has been more locally born population than elsewhere since the 1960s, when the borders were closed during the Cold War. As indicated by various sources of identity polling, the majority of Hong Kong Chinese had developed a hybrid identity by which they view themselves primarily as “Hong Kongers” by 1997, with almost 60% of them identifying as purely “Hong Kongers” or “Hong Konger in China,” instead of “Chinese in Hong Kong” or purely “Chinese” (HKPORI, 2023a, 2023b). Running parallel with this social phenomenon, Hong Kong has made itself a commercial and financial center in Asia. Her economy is externally oriented, with a trade-to-GDP ratio of 4:1, while managing the world’s 8th largest trading economy (Yeung, Reference Yeung2023). Under the “one country, two systems” principle, Hong Kong retained as an independent customs territory having its own government and currency, with English remaining an official language.
Despite the SAR government’s self-positioning as “Asia’s world city,” the economic and political integration with the Mainland after 1997 has been increasingly prominent and widely perceived as an erosion of its autonomy and uniqueness. With more coercive national education programs imposed and the final decision of Beijing to deny the universal suffrage that had been promised in the Basic Law before 1997, massive protests, known as the Umbrella movement, broke out in 2014. The failed pursuit of a democratic Hong Kong SAR under Chinese sovereignty, along with the plan to integrate Hong Kong into the Greater Bay Area (Canton Province), was followed by the rise of Hong-Kongese identity and the political demands for Hong Kong independence, particularly among the younger and more educated (Veg, Reference Veg2017). In response to the proposed Bill allowing Hong Kongers to be extradited to courts in the Mainland, the Anti-Extradition Bill Protests in 2019 took a more radical and violent form of confrontation with China. The 2019 protests resulted in forceful suppression, and the National Security Law was imposed by Beijing in 2020, entailing more direct control of Hong Kong by China and the end of the “one country two systems.”
The coincident tightening of ideology and personal freedom under the COVID policy in 2020 served as a starkly contrasting backdrop for the civic society’s response in Hong Kong. Before elaborating upon the details, there are a few points related to identity and citizenship worthy of attention.
First, the hybrid identity of Hong Kongers has been subject to a high degree of fluctuation following a number of political developments. In the first decade of the HKSAR, the top-down patriotic nation-building intended to re-Sinise Hong Kong has been accompanied by a bottom-up nationalization process, with certain Hong Kong Chinese themselves trying to embrace a new Chinese national identity (Ma, Reference Ma2007; Lau et al., Reference Lau, Lam and Leung2010). The proportion of those who identify themselves purely as Chinese steadily increased after 1997, reaching a peak of 39% during the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, with the pure Hong Konger identity dropping to 18%. Nonetheless, a L-shaped downturn of Chinese identity afterwards was observed as a more assertive form of Chinese nationalism was encroaching, with the pure Chinese identity bottoming out at 10% amid the 2019 protests (HKPORI, 2023a, 2023b). In 2022, 18% of Hong Kong Chinese identified themselves as purely “Chinese,” with only 2% of those who are under 30 doing so.
Moreover, the Chinese identification in Hong Kong is associated with one’s preference for Chinese national interests over personal freedom (Wong, Reference Wong1996; Wong and Wan, Reference Wong and Wan2007) and trust in the HKSAR government and Chinese Central Government (Steinhardt et al., Reference Steinhardt, Li and Jiang2018). Changes in identity, especially among the younger generations, are thus highly relevant to the political unrest and resistance to China.
Third, the self-image of Hong Kong as a global city or a highly modernized/ Westernized society has been central to the hybrid identity that distinguishes Hong Kong Chinese from the Mainland Chinese. As Mathews (Reference Mathews1997) suggests, the cultural identity “Hongkongese” comprises three elements of “Chineseness plus”: “affluence /cosmopolitanism/ capitalism,” “English/colonial education/colonialism” and “democracy/human rights/the rule of law.” In this connection, a dichotomous pair of constructions of the Hong Kong cultural identity have long been vying for hegemonic status among the Hong Kong Chinese: “Hong Kong as a part of China” vs. “Hong Kong as apart from China.” To this end, when asked in polls to indicate on a 0-to10 scale their strength of identity as a “global citizen,” Hong Kong respondents produced a mean score of approximately 7 in 2019, as compared with means scores of roughly 6 and 5 for “Chinese citizen” and “PRC citizen” respectively (HKPORI, 2019). This identity hierarchy also played a significant role in constructing an “international front” during the 2019 protests (Lee, Reference Lee2022a).
The politics and policy of COVID-19 response in Hong Kong were inevitably reshaping and reshaped by the dynamics in citizenship discourse, as in Taiwan, while interestingly, as we will unpack as follows, the manner in which the BNT vaccine and Zero-COVID strategy were symbolized varied.
Vaccine politics in Hong Kong
Hong Kong residents were given the option to select one of two vaccines in early 2021, one developed by China’s Sinovac and the other by BNT. The landscape of vaccine politics in Hong Kong differed slightly from Taiwan – While the option of Sinovac was seen as a symbol of confidence in China as well, BNT was a choice for those who did not share it.
The SAR government’s message was favoring Sinovac as the “national” choice of vaccine, with the Chief Executive, Carrie Lam, and the Secretary for Food and Health, Sophia Chan, and other top officials publicly opting to receive the Chinese vaccine in early 2021. Even when faced with a growing body of evidence and the government advisory panel’s preference for the BNT vaccine at the time, the SAR government claimed that both vaccines demonstrated equal efficacy (Kwan, Reference Kwan2022), going so far as to invoke emergency powers to authorize Sinovac’s use prior to the release of third-phase clinical data.
It is suggested that general instability and perceived loss of freedom brew discontent and distrust in the Hong Kong government, a distrust which ultimately extended to COVID-19 vaccines – Over half of the citizens did not have confidence in Sinovac when the government prepared its rollout at the end of 2020 (Lau et al., Reference Lau, Yuen, Yue and Grépin2022). Facing challenges on the government’s bias in Sinovac procurement and its efficacy by healthcare workers, Carrie Lam criticized it as “spreading fake news, misinformation and rumours.” (Chau, Reference Chau2020) Yet it seemed to be of little help in addressing the problem of distrust in the government – immediately after Lam’s first shot of Sinovac vaccine in February 2021, there were various posts circulated on social media claiming that Lam had not been inoculated with the Chinese vaccine (Khurram and Hibberd, Reference Khurram and Hibberd2021).
This development highlighted doubts regarding the integrity of Lam’s entire administration along with the Chinese Mainland as a whole – Confidence in Sinovac was arguably also undermined by a spate of food safety incidents which occurred in the mainland over the past few decades, including the 2004 scandal in which human hair was found to be used in the production of soy sauce, as well as when chemical-laden milk powder was responsible for the death of six or more babies (Chan, Reference Chan2021). A media study revealed that distrust in government contributed to vaccine hesitancy in Hong Kong, mainly in relation to concerns around Sinovac (Ho, Reference Ho2021), while BNT has been the target of pro-Chinese media (Schmidt, Reference Schmidt2021).
Notwithstanding the conflicting message sent by authorities and media on the vaccine that resulted in comparatively low vaccination rates in Hong Kong (Kwan, Reference Kwan2022), the younger and more educated were leaning toward BNT. A survey on college students in mid-2021 found that vaccines originating from overseas increase 65% of their likelihood to take vaccine (Li et al., Reference Li, Chong, Chan, Chan and Tong2021), in contrast to the general pattern observed in international data that people tend to favor home-grown vaccines (Barceló et al., Reference Barceló, Sheen, Tung and Wu2022); another local survey found only 6.6% of medical students were opting for Sinovac (Ngai et al., Reference Ngai, Yip, Khoo and Sridhar2022). The government registry has further confirmed the general tendency for the younger to opt for BNT and the older for Sinovac (HKSAR Government, 2022). The inter-generational conflicts over whether China or the West is more trustworthy seemed to extend to COVID-19 vaccines.
Various local surveys indeed found reduced government vaccine program support among political opposition supporters or those who have lower trust in the government in Hong Kong (Yuen, Reference Yuen2022; Yu et al., Reference Yu, Lam, Lam, Li, Chen, Lam and Yeung2022; Zheng et al., Reference Zheng, Guo and Cheung2022; Yuan et al., Reference Yuan, Xu and Wong2024). In line with international public health literature (Quinn et al., Reference Quinn, Parmer, Freimuth, Hilyard, Musa and Kim2013; Jamison et al., Reference Jamison, Quinn and Freimuth2019), those who had less trust in the government and preferred personal freedom over pandemic control tended to reject the Hong Kong government’s vaccination program. Given the Hong Kong context as an authoritarian regime, the opposition supporters, who tended to be younger and educated, shared these characteristics. A study by the Hong Kong Baptist University (2021) further indicates those resistant to vaccination were most likely to see vaccination as supportive of the government, while those acceptant of the vaccine carry the opposite view.
More importantly, the distrust in government and preference for personal freedom, in terms of their joint effects on disapproval of the vaccination program, were accompanied by two region-specific variables, namely place of origin and opposition to the exertion of influence on Hong Kong COVID-19 policymaking by the Mainland. The likelihood of those of an origin other than Hong Kong (predominantly Mainland China in the Hong Kong context) to support the vaccination program was five times greater than that of their counterparts with a Hong Kong origin. This was observed in a negative correlation between perceived Chinese influence and support for the vaccination program, with each unit of increase in that perception (as indicated on a 0-to-10 scale) being correlated with an 11.6% decrease in support (Yuen, Reference Yuen2022).
Taken together, the politics of vaccines in Hong Kong can be perceived as the extension of its fight for the Hong-Kongese identity and autonomy from Beijing interventions, despite the absence of published direct evidence on the statistical association between choice of vaccines and political views or identity (Tsang, Reference Tsang2022).
Fighting COVID in an authoritarian context
While Taiwan and Hong Kong were recognized as outstanding examples of containing COVID-19 due to the low number of confirmed cases and deaths in the first year of the pandemic, researchers have noticed that the former’s success with high governance capacity and legitimacy was not mirrored in Hong Kong, which featured civic society and social mobilization out of the distrust in government (Wan et al., Reference Wan, Ka-Ki Ho, Wong and Chiu2020; Hartley and Jarvis, Reference Hartley and Jarvis2020; Chung et al., Reference Chung, Chan, Chan, Chen, Wong and Chung2022; Wong, Reference Wong2022).
Hong Kong was placed the third-worst-performing jurisdiction in an international survey comparing citizen perception of government performance in the management of COVID-19, even before the 2021 outbreak (Sim, Reference Sim2020). Participants were asked a series of questions, such as who made the greatest contribution to control of the pandemic within the city (Yuen et al., Reference Yuen, Cheng, Or, Grépin, Fu, Yung and Yue2021). On a seven-point scale, “government” received the lowest rating (a mean score of 4.74), while “citizens” had a mean score of 6.24 and “businesses” were ranked second (5.13) Similarly, 74.6% of the respondents in a local poll concurred with the view that the absence of a further serious outbreak would be attributed to collective effort on the part of citizens. Remarkably, more than 90% of those study participants who regarded themselves as “democrats” or “localists” felt that the ability to control the pandemic would be due to collective efforts on the part of citizens (Lee, Reference Lee2022b).
The self-securing model in Hong Kong can be observed in the community-organized facemask distribution. While the government remained indecisive as a result of their efforts to quell protests in 2019, social activists, NGOs, and community organizations had been providing free facemasks to disadvantaged citizens in Hong Kong by late January and early February 2020 (Wong, Reference Wong2020).
In April and May 2020, a number of different small-scale rallies took place in shopping centres across multiple districts. The SAR government subsequently banned such gatherings, along with the annual commemoration of the June Fourth Tiananmen Square protests, under the pretext of pandemic control. The government was criticized for leveraging the pandemic in its suppression of protest activities. Parallel to this, the restriction orders, which required more cooperation and active participation on the part of the public, such as gatherings, banning dine-in at restaurants, compulsory testing, and district lockdown, etc., became increasingly controversial and challenged. Political tendencies are mainly associated with these controversies, as those who tend to align with a “non-establishment” position are more likely to have negative opinions on these policies than those who are leaning toward an “establishment” – oriented stance (Zheng et al., 2022).
The Leave Home Safe pandemic tracking app can well typify the manner in which distrust in the government undermined how anti-pandemic measures in Hong Kong were received by the public. Designed to track citizens’ locations in public areas, the app was originally released by the SAR government in November 2020. In March 2021, however, a mere 21.5% of citizen used the app on a frequent basis, whilst 50.4% had not previously used the app at the time of the survey, and yet another 47.9% expressed the belief that that “the government may use the personal information recorded by the Leave Home Safe app for purposes unrelated to pandemic control.” (ibid).
As Harrison and Kristensen (Reference Harrison and Kristensen2021) put it in a U.N. report, as part of a larger global trend, COVID-19 may have been used by autocratic governments as an opportunity to further undermine already weak democratic governance as political confrontation increased in those “fragile countries.” They suggest that the confrontation in question arose from conflicting opinions over lockdown measures, the potential infringement upon human rights in their enforcement, and crisis mismanagement in response to COVID-19. Hong Kong was not that “fragile” thanks to its societal capacity to mobilize citizens. Yet, while citizens in Hong Kong, as in Taiwan, generally exhibited a high degree of compliance to various individual-based health measures, including remaining at home, mask wearing in public (Yuen et al., Reference Yuen, Cheng, Or, Grépin, Fu, Yung and Yue2021), those measures with social control elements such as contract tracking and gathering restrictions were received negatively and resisted amid the tightening of political rights and freedom in the city. This tension between civic responsibilities and civic liberties in pandemic control appeared all the more salient in Hong Kong, given the authoritarian context.
Open to China or the world?
Modeling its own approach based on the sweeping quarantine and restrictions of the Mainland, Hong Kong has remained firm in its adherence to “zero-COVID” policy, closing its borders to visitors at the start of 2020 since the onset of the pandemic, like in Mainland China, seeking to stamp out all outbreaks. There were, however, increasing public demands and pressures from the local and international capital as the sustained closure has vexed both residents and businesses alike (McGregor, Reference McGregor2021). The Chief Executive, Carrie Lam, remained resolute in her purported priority to reopen quarantine-free travel between Hong Kong and China, where “zero-Covid” will still be in place for the foreseeable future, as opposed to with the rest of the world, where people have been living with the virus.
We have made it very clear that our focus will be opening the border with the mainland. Hong Kong people need to go to the mainland…Of course, international travel is important, international business is important to us – but by comparison, the mainland is more important.
(CNN, 2021)
During the political tumult which emerged as a byproduct of the 2019 protests, it is suggested that Lam’s administration began to emphasize rhetorics on its alignment with the mainland, with an eager to avoid being viewed as pursuing the “failed Western strategy” of living with virus as the Chinese president Xi Jinping’s indeed explicitly called for “all necessary measures” of the SAR government to get the epidemic under control (Bala, Reference Bala2022).
However, Year 2021 saw the harms of the policy magnified as the reputation of Hong Kong as an international hub of business, tourism, and logistics deteriorated, with a notable amount of capital and talents lost to Singapore, its longstanding rival for status as the leading global city in the region, where decisive moves to reopen to the world had been made (Kukreja, Reference Kukreja2022). The controversy over whether Hong Kong should be reopened to the world was looming, with experts on the government’s advisory committee openly pleading for reopening Hong Kong in early 2022 as vaccination rates increased (Yuen et al., Reference Yuen, Cheng, Or, Grépin, Fu, Yung and Yue2021). The damage of the isolation policy to Hong Kong’s status as a global city, on top of the 2019 protests, has become increasingly visible in the international community:
[i]t will be the first time in the 180-year history of modern Hong Kong that it has been open to China but not the outside world…
Hong Kong’s status as an international centre for business and finance was at risk long before its zero-Covid strategy isolated it from the rest of the world. The intense political turmoil in the months prior to the pandemic had magnified the debate around the whole nature of the city’s relationship with China and what it represents to the outside world….
(Financial Times, 2022)
In March 2022, Hong Kong reduced certain restrictions for inbound flights and removed its two-year ban on non-resident visitors. These moves were widely regarded as part of a larger effort by powerful figures in business and political spheres in the city to preserve Hong Kong’s reputation as an international financial hub, especially given the fact that President Xi Jinping’s rigid COVID-zero strategy offered little chance of reestablishing an open border between Hong Kong and the Mainland (Lindberg and Frost, Reference Lindberg and Frost2022). It is also observed that Carrie Lam continued to face growing pressure regarding the question of whether the SAR government was decoupling from the mainland’s dynamic zero-COVID strategy, and thereby performing a “difficult balancing act” (Wong and Cheung, Reference Wong and Cheung2022) when easing COVID-19 measures.
The unsustainability of the Chinese Central Government’s policy was manifested in the overall economic and political crisis in the Mainland in the second half of 2022, creating a window of opportunity for Hong Kong to plot a COVID-19 path not resembling China’s zero-tolerance approach. To this end, Carrie Lam’s successor, John Lee, finally ended the hotel quarantine system for travelers in October 2022, while maintaining contact tracking and vaccine passport measures until the U-turn of Mainland China in pandemic control to wave all corresponding policies after A4 Protests in late November.
Hong Kong’s struggle to retain its international city status while adhering to some extent to Xi’s COVID-zero policy is a telling example of its embarrassing position squeezed in the middle of the Western and Chinese approaches to governance, or as Carroll put it, at “the edge of empires” (Carroll, Reference Carroll2007). Hong Kong’s handover back to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 marked a journey of “learning to belong to a nation,” implying the alignment to the politics and policy in the mainland, which were somewhat at odds with its “market-based national identity” (Mathew, Reference Mathew, Mathew, Ma and Lui2008). After all, the establishment of the SAR and the “one country two systems” was a market discourse that tacitly conceded the necessity of the capitalist system in Hong Kong to serve the Chinese economy. Once again, the market discourse served to endorse Hong Kong’s autonomy in terms of COVID policy, though that autonomy was nonetheless substantially reduced after the 2019 protests and subsequent National Security Law.
While the secondary impacts of the mismanagement of the CCP in the pandemic on the Chinese authoritarian regime (Cohen, Reference Cohen2022) remain to be seen, it seems to prove that tying Hong Kong closely to China in social policy and management does more harm than good. Future research efforts may attempt to answer the question of whether the unnecessarily prolonged isolation policy in Hong Kong is reinforcing the anti-Chinese sentiment and discourse. The overall agenda of Communist China in the governance of Hong Kong is conflicting indigenously, with the nationalist one (one country) asking her to be more like part of China, and the economic one (two systems) asking her to be different to take advantage of its connection to the West. The sway of Hong Kong in its Covid-19 border policy is just one example of this conflict.
Discussion and conclusion
This paper examines the manner in which pandemic nationalism was reshaped by and is reshaping citizenship in Sino-phone regions of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong with respect to national identity and individual freedom.
China’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been characterized by a strong sense of nationalism, with the government reasserting its role in containing the virus and portraying the crisis as evidence of China’s strength and resilience, i.e. the state capacity in developing homegrown vaccines and the COVID-Zero policy. In the selected themes of COVID policy of vaccine importation and border control, responses in Taiwan and Hong Kong demonstrated how the emergence of their national identity reacted to the encroachment of Chinese influence on their respective degrees of autonomy.
The politics of COVID-19 in Taiwan and Hong Kong
We highlight the preference for non-Chinese vaccines of the people in these two regions to contribute to the discussion surrounding the concept of vaccine preference as politically driven. The effects of partisanship and trust in authorities on the politics of vaccines are well noted within the academic community, but evidence primarily tends to concern the topic of vaccine hesitancy (Lin et al., Reference Lin, Tu and Beitsch2020), and the own-country bias towards COVID-19 vaccination has also drawn recent attention among intellectual circles (Barceló et al., Reference Barceló, Sheen, Tung and Wu2022). The Taiwan and Hong Kong cases, in which home-grown vaccines were not highly embraced by the people or were unavailable, indicate a variant form of expressing their national identity, which was manifested as a rejection of what is perceived as a symbol of Chinese influence.
Remarkably, over the course of the formation of national identity of these regions, global citizenship narratives were heavily employed as an antithesis to the Chinese nationalist counterpart. In Taiwan specifically, the response to the pandemic on the part of the government and civil society can be characterized by a focus on global cooperation and solidarity, with the country providing medical supplies and assistance to other countries in need as a helping member of the international community. Its priority given to reopening to the world over other Sino-phone regions in the final stage of the pandemic has also typified this vision in relation to its positioning as an independent territory. In Hong Kong, the controversy over the priority in reopening borders to China has been employed as a means by which the special administration by China can decouple from the centralized political control, in view of rebuilding its reputation as an international city.
With respect to personal freedom, the pandemic exacerbated tensions between the pro-democracy movement and the government in Hong Kong, with the SAR government leveraging the crisis to crack down on dissent and restrict civil liberties. Such tension seemed to be absent in China, where patriotism was found to have indirect effects on favorable evaluations of governmental performance through the support of lockdown policies (Zhai et al., Reference Zhai, Lu and Wu2023), at least before the A4 movement. Interestingly, in the fully democratic regime of Taiwan, the ontology of war (Lehtinen and Brunila, Reference Lehtinen and Brunila2021) was used to justify the high degree of power exerted over populations in countering the virus and producing a unified political subject and an external enemy (China). This seems to suggest it is state capacity rather than polity that determines how COVID can be implemented within the ideological framework of pandemic nationalism regarding the restrictions on liberty. Yet, as Greitens (Reference Greitens2020) argues, such impacts of pandemic nationalism are largely path-dependent, as consolidated democracies have managed to avoid significant compromise of democratic standards with institutional oversight, while autocracies have been likely to capitalize on the anti-pandemic measures as a device of autocratization. In this regard, Hong Kong differed from the other two Sino-phone countries as people’s alignment to government responses as democratic values were fluctuating there rather than fully institutionalized or marginalized as in Taiwan or Mainland China.
The theoretical implications
The aforementioned cases of reframing national identity and individual freedom in Taiwan and Hong Kongduring COVID-19 shed light on the ongoing debate over the topic of pandemic nationalism. On one hand, exclusionary nationalist sentiments, as predicted by Bieber (Reference Bieber2020) and Greenfeld (Woods et al., Reference Woods, Schertzer, Greenfeld, Hughes and Miller-Idriss2020: 813), have led to increased authoritarian measures, strengthened borders, and greater reliance on national identities, i.e. increased government control and sharpen distinctions between in-groups and out-groups. On the other hand, as Berrocal et al. (Reference Berrocal, Kranert and Attolino2021) argue, such crises also create space for expressions of transnational solidarity and a collective global identity. In this study, we have illustrated how Taiwan’s international aid was used as a diplomatic initiative to enhance its international standing, and Hong Kong’s struggle for its autonomy over its border policy and vaccine choices to align with the West rather than China.
Noticeably, such global citizenship and identity discourses that see the global community as a significant affiliated group were deployed under the shadow of the Chinese government’s nationalist agenda of integrating other territories in the Greater China (Woods et al., Reference Woods, Schertzer, Greenfeld, Hughes and Miller-Idriss2020). In this connection, the apparently conflicting forms of solidarity, those vertically rooted in national identity and the transnational one, were compatible with each other in the joint force against the prominent out-group – the Chinese influence, on top of the virus, by these two Sino-phone societies. This may also explain why another important aspect of the supernational identity, the regional one, was contested in the Taiwan and Hong Kong cases, as it implies a sense of membership to the greater China or Sino-phoneworld as the out-group.
As Berrocal et al. (Reference Berrocal, Kranert and Attolino2021) have suggested, the construction of affiliates in the fight against COVID varied significantly across countries with different social contexts. We add that the unique landscape of the geo-politics in the Asia-Pacific region, i.e. the national identity making in Taiwan and Hong Kong to further distinguish themselves from China, is useful here for our understanding of the construction of the regional out-group who are precluded from being their affiliates.
The policy implications
Regarding the politics of vaccination in Taiwan and Hong Kong, this study has discussed how low trust levels in government and national identity sentiments could affect people’s choice and willingness. In a public health perspective, rebuilding political trust (Chung et al., Reference Chung, Chan, Chan, Chen, Wong and Chung2022) and the capacity of healthcare professionals (Chau et al., Reference Chau, Lo, Saran, Leung, Lam and Thompson2021) in public communication have been recommended for better preparedness of the next pandemic, especially in relation to the provision of trustworthy vaccine-related information and scaling up the promotion (Wong et al., Reference Wong, Zhong, Chung, Nilsen, Wong and Yeoh2022).
While government-led publicity needed to be strengthened in this regard (Zhang et al., Reference Zhang, Tang and Lau2025), the highly politicized public discourse of vaccination has discredited government’s public education efforts. Drawing on the Taiwan case, Cook (Reference Cook2024) recommends enforcing medical science transparency in health data usage and governmental decision-making, as well as third-party professional science communicators to reduce the perceived bias in the government information. An interview-based study in Hong Kong echoes the findings with elderly adults saying that their motivation for vaccination was affected by the opinions of medical experts (Siu et al., Reference Siu, Cao and Shum2022). These all pointed to a long-standing legitimizing role that the healthcare profession has been playing in heath policy (Friedson, Reference Freidson1970; Klein, Reference Klein1990), endorsing government decisions in healthcare.
Research limitations
Despite the contributions discussed above, this study’s interpretive design has certain inherent limitations. The analysis draws on publicly available materials – government statements, media reports, and survey summaries – which provide socially mediated rather than raw data. As a result, it lacks the textual precision and quantifiable depth that formal content or discourse analysis might offer. However, this trade-off reflects the study’s goal of reconstructing meaning and context rather than measuring frequency or causality.
Interpretive narrative analysis also involves the researcher judgment in identifying and connecting storylines across cases. Although triangulation and consistency checks strengthen credibility, alternative readings remain possible. Finally, because the study relies on secondary sources, it cannot capture the private deliberations behind official narratives. These constraints are consistent with an interpretive approach that values contextual depth and meaning reconstruction over generalization and testability (Geertz, Reference Geertz1973; Bevir and Rhodes, Reference Bevir and Rhodes2005).
Concluding remarks
In sum, this research underscores the nuanced and multifaceted relationship between nationalism, identity politics, and public health governance. Through the lens of citizenship, this paper offers a regional perspective to extend the understanding of pandemic nationalism, which largely refers to prioritizing nationals’ needs and inequalities in the global distribution of vaccines in the Western literature, to the context of geo-politics regarding Chinese nationalism and its diffusion to the Sino-phone world in the pandemic. Our findings have also enriched the discussion of pandemic nationalism regarding how exclusionary (national) and inclusionary (global) citizenship discourses worked together in such a context.
Open access
