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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2023

A Community Response to the Covid-19 Pandemic: Collective Actions by Chinese Residents of a Multiethnic Neighborhood in the Northern Suburbs of Paris

Résumé

By focusing on Chinese migrants and their descendants living in the Village Residence, located in a multiethnic neighborhood north of Paris, this chapter examines collective actions (distribution of masks and Chinese medicines, food delivery for people who are infected) by the Chinese residents to respond to the pandemic, marked by many kinds of inequality in terms of access to health care. Previous tensions between Chinese and non-Chinese residents that predated the pandemic (related to the danger of racist attacks on Chinese people and previous struggles against urban violence) were resurrected and exacerbated by the health crisis. During the pandemic, new security borders were erected around the Chinese population and against non-Chinese populations. The border of protection became ethnically defined and protected the Chinese among themselves. At this housing development, Covid-19 was widely perceived as a disease of the “others.” Chinese residents are both subject to this racialization of the disease and participants in the dynamic by redefining distances and borders with neighbors of non-Chinese origin, in the name of safety and protection from Covid-19. Through this example, authors show the two consequences of community safekeeping: on the one hand, in a health emergency, especially early in the pandemic, before medical solutions to the coronavirus were developed, by practicing testing, tracing, and isolation, the community provided its members with vital medical and paramedical resources and support networks; on the other hand, the community spirit led to the exclusion of those who were perceived as foreign and potentially threatening to that community.
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Dates et versions

hal-04312995 , version 1 (30-11-2023)

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Yong Li, Simeng Wang. A Community Response to the Covid-19 Pandemic: Collective Actions by Chinese Residents of a Multiethnic Neighborhood in the Northern Suburbs of Paris. Simeng Wang. Chinese in France amid the Covid-19 Pandemic. Daily Lives, Racial Struggles and Transnational Citizenship of Migrants and Descendants, BRILL, pp.151-174, 2023, 9789004678606. ⟨10.1163/9789004678606_007⟩. ⟨hal-04312995⟩
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