Hidden Scripts Behind Silenced Racism : Chinese immigrants' reasserting national identity as dissociative or coping strategies to the COVID-19 racism in Stockholm

The thesis investigates how Chinese immigrants in Stockholm experienced racism during COVID-19, and how their subjective tendency to China as the ascribed country of origin affects such experiences. Using an interpretive phenomenological approach, nine semi-structured interviews and one expert interview were conducted and analyzed. Theoretical understandings of ethnic boundary negotiation and everyday nationalism illuminate four central themes in the data: COVID-19-related racism, differing perceptions of racism, reasserting Chinese national identity, and uncomfortable everyday experiences. The study shows that racism occurred during COVID-19, mainly in forms of deliberate avoidance, and occasionally in verbal forms. While international working environments invite some participants to interact with ethnic others, which arguably mitigates perceived discomfort, the nation-state, as an internalized and embodied category of practice, produces and reproduces cognitive boundaries with different value orientations and preferences from those of ethnic others. Consequently, COVID-19 led most participants to reassert their Chinese national identities, primarily through intra-ethnic relations and cultural affinity. Notably, China-related professionals and males tend to deploy elite discourses of China's accomplished economic development and/or rising global influence. Those traits, though not publicly recognized by the host society, serve as dissociative or coping strategies in perceiving racism, which is not necessarily limited to COVID-19.