A Relational Reflection on Pandemic Nationalism

Drawing on the case of Wuhan, this article considers how nationalist discourses evolved in the Chinese context during the COVID-19 pandemic. It adopts a relational perspective to argue that, just as the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed countries’ vulnerability to diverse forms of nationalism and the danger that this presents, it also reveals an irony: how despite being treated as a ‘solution’ to the pandemic, nationalism can only exist and thrive insofar as its alter or Other—represented by the novel coronavirus itself and, for some countries, the ‘China threat’—also thrives. To prevent this from becoming a vicious cycle, the article contends that nationalism is no solution and that new thinking on coexistence is the vaccine needed for securing the post-COVID-19 world order.