UK Chinese people and COVID – experiences during the pandemic

24 April 2023

After the emergence of SARS-COV-19 in Wuhan, China in December of 2019, there were reports of a change in social responses towards Chinese people living in the UK and worldwide. Some of these reports were positive – including community support – but some were not. These include xenophobia, avoidance and other responses which could lead to problems for the individual as well as the community, such as economic hardship, or delays in seeking help for medical symptoms.

Dr Mohammed Al-Talib and Dr Katie Wong, from Population Health Sciences at the Bristol Medical School, used a Rapid COVID Research Call from the Elizabeth Blackwell Institute to investigate the issues, working with clinical colleague Dr Qiaoling Zhou and supervised by Pippa Bailey, Associate Professor in Renal Medicine.

“We wanted to understand the experiences of the UK Chinese population during COVID,” said Dr Wong. “The idea was to inform how best to support people during, and after the epidemic – and to understand how isolation measures in China have affected individuals both there and internationally.”

Parallel projects

Dr Wong’s project ran alongside an investigation into the views of the UK Chinese population towards living kidney donation. Between April 2020 and January 2021, Dr Wong undertook 15 semi-structured one-to-one interviews which investigated the UK Chinese population’s experiences of COVID-19, in particular its social impacts. The analysis was ledby Dr Al-Talib.

“All of the study participants reported experience of what they perceived as xenophobically motivated behaviour, either personally or within their community,” said Dr Wong. “Everyone I interviewed felt more at risk, or more vulnerable to xenophobic attitudes.”

Precautionary masking

This was perhaps exacerbated by the early adoption of face masks by large numbers of the UK Chinese community, at a time when evidence for their effectiveness was lacking.

“Precautionary mask wearing practices were common in China and East Asia, thanks in part to previous pandemics,” said Dr Wong. “The UK Chinese community adopted mask wearing very soon after the threat of COVID-19 was identified – sooner than many in the rest of the population – which led to an increase in the abuse participants reported, especially when coupled to negative media reporting: people apportioned blame for the pandemic onto China and the Chinese.”

“Modern technology has enabled information from friends and family as well as media sources to travel easily. COVID-19 was the first pandemic to cause significant worldwide disruption in this information age; as a result of our findings, it’s clear that more needs to be done to mitigate the potential for stigma and social and economic harm to minority groups in the future.”

Further information

Dr Wong’s research has been published in Plos-one