COVID-19 reconstituted interactions and people's relations into almost everything virtual. The state, also adopted new regimes: of surveillance, emergency powers and market interventions by the state. [[Benedict Anderson]] developed a concept "[[imagined community]]". The author in this paper said, if the nation truly is the fragile imaginary as envisioned by [[Benedict Anderson]], then such action (reconstitution of relations) strike at the core of its being. The Chinese state's initial reaction to COVID-19 was slow and bureaucratic. Once it recognized the severity and scope of the epidemic, however, many international observers were struck by the intensity of China's response. This leads scholars such as Kevin Carrico to label the Chinese nation a “fantasy-driven affective identificatory system,” meaning that it actively cultivates an imagined collective identity for its citizens.4 Such identificatory systems, Carrico argues, work best when they are perceived to be under threat of dissolution. Writing of a cholera epidemic in Venezuela in the 1990s, anthropologists Charles Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs argue that it “reshaped categories of citizenship and how social and political exclusion affected people’s lives.”5 In Halifax, the COVID-19 crisis, not yet at its peak at the time of this writing, has exacerbated preexisting tensions within the local Chinese community. The COVID-19 crisis, therefore, ==has sundered the ideal of Greater China as an ethnopolitical unity.== Just as the virus has deconstituted the bodies of its victims, Canada’s Chinese communities have been exposed as similarly fragmented. Questions such as what constitutes China and Chinese are deeply tied to social and political actions in response to the virus. The question of what responsibilities individuals have to “China” — whether that be local Chinese restaurants, suffering citizens in Wuhan or people fleeing the disaster by returning home — has promoted a range of responses and disagreements that can be largely understood through the lens of identity, whether as an overseas Chinese or a sojourning Mainlander temporarily abroad. Gone are ambivalences about identity or the role of the state. Successful containment of the virus serves at the same time to restructure the imagined bonds of ethnonationalism. It sets apart those who have suffered and sacrificed against others who have not learned from them. ==Narratives of common suffering, cooperation and togetherness will be the glue that slowly puts the nation back together afterward==. In the case of China, despite the callous early actions of officials who sought to ignore the virus in the name of stability, the state will likely emerge from this crisis with more legitimacy and loyalty than before as people affirm their common identity, their sense of Chineseness. ## Citation Henry, E. S (2020) Reconstituting China in a Time of Pandemic. Anthropology Now. Volume 12, Issue 1: PP 50-54