COVID-19 preventative measures: A case study among immigrants in Hangzhou, China

This thesis is based on a 5 month long ethnographic fieldwork in Hangzhou, China, where I spent time with immigrants. I will explore the COVID-19 virus, how it spread, and how it became a world pandemic. As an effect of this, countries started to implement preventative measures to fight the virus. Through my thesis, I explore the different ways the Hangzhou Municipal Government implemented the COVID-19 measures, and its consequences among the population. Derived from these measures, my main research question examines: How do the preventative measures against the COVID-19 virus affect immigrant workers in Hangzhou, China? Based on case studies from the field, I will discuss how the everyday lives of immigrants were affected by the restrictions, which included mask usage, lockdowns, quarantine, social spaces, and the implementations of contact-tracing surveillance against the populations. Through these measures, I witnessed an increased in stigma, differentiation, and divide between those who were the native population and those who were considered foreign. I have explored that COVID-19 has contributed to increased pre-conceived biases against “the others” in China as well as in many other parts of the world. For this reason, I will use China as a case study with comparable examples from other countries.