The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way people from all walks of life relate to one another. Soon after COVID-19 was first identified in Mainland China in 2019, the governments and civic societies in Taiwan and Hong Kong promptly responded to the crisis by employing strict border control, drawing on lessons learnt from the SARs pandemic in 2003. In the past two decades, the Chinese government has increased its influence in the Pacific region in different forms. This paper discusses how the response to the pandemic in Taiwan and Hong Kong was transforming and transformed by the politics of identity and citizenship against this background. We argue that the efforts of the Chinese Government to promote Chinese identity in those Sino-phone countries and the political movements building a distinctive national identity from China there is central to this transformation.
