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Negotiation between the Public and Private: an Observation from Chinese Citizens’ Social Conformity and Differentiations during the COVID-19 Pandemic

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DOI: 10.23977/EEIM2020024

Author(s)

Xinyan Tao

Corresponding Author

Xinyan Tao

ABSTRACT

With individuals' strengthening awareness of respiratory hygiene during the COVID-19 pandemic, unconventional moral judgment and supervisory mechanisms regarding using masks have aroused controversy on a global scale. The infection control works in the way of efficiency while, on the other hand, citizen supervision lays its disputable moral judgment upon the vague boundary between public and private. If a new citizen's supervision to compel people to follow good respiratory hygiene is established, it can change the basic civil understanding of what is public behavior and what is private behavior. This study aims to discover how this change takes place and its underlying mechanism. Using an online questionnaire that contains both general public judgments and specific private scenario-based questions, the public engagement of Chinese citizens on social supervision of respiratory hygiene is depicted. It is argued according to survey results that civic toleration of not wearing masks are significantly higher when the situations are within private boundaries, suggesting that supervisory mechanism on using masks in case of COVID-19 may successfully become some kind of social conformity yet with quite confusing collective imagination on the private space of citizenship.

KEYWORDS

social conformity, wearing masks, smoking

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