Abstract
In this article, we examine the Covid-19 experiences of a group of Chinese university students studying in the city of Guangzhou. We draw on journal entries that Chinese students submitted to the Pandemic Journaling Project between March and May 2022, along with follow-up responses in July and December 2022, to argue that these students spent most of their undergraduate years living in a state of “seesaw precarity.” We define seesaw precarity as a protracted period during which many Chinese were unable to predict from one day to the next whether they would be free to engage in the quotidian activities of everyday life. We trace student reactions and adaptations as they struggled to attend class, buy food, and see friends and family in the midst of unpredictable swings between openness and closedness. The seesaw nature of restrictions spurred considerable anxiety among the students we followed, but also produced an optimistic mindset we refer to as “anxious hope.” Participants accepted the necessity of Covid controls and felt it was incumbent upon them as individuals to adjust to this reality. They saw themselves as responsible for actively cultivating a positive mindset. Our findings suggest that the promotion of emotional self-care and anxious hope during the pandemic may have supported the viability of long-term controls as well as the acceptability of their sudden abandonment, while muting the possibility of resistance.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank all participating students, their institutions, and the entire PJP team.
Funding
Mason’s time, and the Pandemic Journaling Project platform, were supported in part by the National Science Foundation (BCS-2148566 and BCS-2032407). Mason also acknowledges the support of the Population Studies and Training Center, which is funded by a National Institutes of Health center grant (P2C HD041020), and the Humanities Research Fund of Brown University. This paper analyzes data from the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP), which was founded in May 2020 by Sarah S. Willen and Katherine A. Mason as a joint initiative of the University of Connecticut and Brown University. PJP has been supported by multiple sponsors at the University of Connecticut and Brown University, including each university's Office of the Vice President for Research as well as UConn's Global Affairs, Human Rights Institute, and Humanities Institute and Brown's Population Studies and Training Center. More information about the Pandemic Journaling Project can be found at https://pandemic-journaling-project.chip.uconn.edu/. In China, Xie’s work was supported by a Guangzhou Academy of Social Sciences (GZASS) Grant (Grant # 2021GZGJ195) and a Guangdong Polytechnic Normal University (GPNU) Research Talent Grant (Grant # 2021SDKYB044).
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Mason, K.A., Xie, J. Seesaw Precarity: Journaling Anxious Hope on a Chinese University Campus During Covid-19. Cult Med Psychiatry 48, 66–90 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-024-09846-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-024-09846-8