Throughout the COVID-19 crisis, nation states found new ways to assert power under the guise of public health, from closing or tightening borders to expanding the boundaries of acceptable citizen surveillance. As these controls increased in intensity, citizens’ passions to cross borders seemed to grow in proportion. Pandemic Crossings explores how these processes of boundary making and crossing, often mediated by digital technology despite inequity of access, had profound and often contradictory consequences on individual lives, national politics, and U.S.–China relations. This rich and geographically diverse collection of studies informed by everyday, individual experiences contribute new insights to the interplay between digital technologies and state governance during the covid-19 pandemic. It opens up new avenues of research not only on the covid-19 pandemic but also on global health crises more broadly. 

Bingchun Meng is a professor in the Department for Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where she also co-directs the LSE–Fudan Global Public Policy Research Centre. She is currently the director of LSE PhD Academy. Her research interests include gender and the media, political economy of media industries, communication governance, and comparative media studies. She is the author of The Politics of Chinese Media: Consensus and Contestation (2018). From 2020 to 2021, she served as a senior fellow of Global Governance Futures 2035 organized by Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin under the sponsorship with Bosch Foundation. 

Guobin Yang is the Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Communication and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Center on Digital Culture and Society and serves as deputy director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China. He is the author of The Wuhan Lockdown, The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China, and The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online. He is also the editor or co-editor of six books.

Elaine J. Yuan is an associate professor in the communication department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on how new forms of communication and technology mediate various social institutions and cultural practices. She has researched extensively on questions regarding network communication, social media, digital platforms, cultural production, and social change. Her book The Web of Meaning: The Internet in a Changing Chinese Society (2021), which examines the role of the Internet as symbolic spaces for the changing cultural practices of privacy, nationalism, and the network market in China, won the 2022 Outstanding Book Award of the Asian/Pacific American Caucus of the National Communication Association.