Covid-19, Community Resilience, and Marginalised Populations: Health Communication and Chinese Communities in the UK

The Covid-19 pandemic brought unprecedented challenges to global public health, economies, and societies. In the UK, the impact of Covid-19 on the economy, healthcare systems, and individual well-being was also profound and multifaceted. While the pandemic had far-reaching consequences for the general population, its impact was not evenly distributed across society. It has been widely reported that the Covid-19 pandemic disproportionately affected ethnic minority communities, exposing and amplifying long-standing health and social inequalities. This study addresses a gap in existing research by contributing new insights to ongoing debates on ethnic minority health and public health communication. It takes a “bottom-up” approach by using focus groups to explore how UK-based Chinese communities, many of whom live at the margins of mainstream British society, drew on forms of community resilience to interpret, navigate, and endure the pandemic. Our study deploys the typology outlined in Buzzanell’s communication theory of resilience alongside thematic analysis as a framework to identify, understand, and analyse the findings from focus groups. Key findings demonstrate that UK Chinese communities constituted resilience in the face of the pandemic by engaging in the processes Buzzanell identifies. They also relied on their cultural resources to build and maintain resilience, and indeed they had to, because culturally and linguistically they had little support from government or health authorities.