Background

            The COVID-19 pandemic that has spread throughout the world since 2020 has impacted every aspect of people's lives worldwide. As of April 11, 2022, there are almost 500 million worldwide infections and 6.2 million deaths (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/). Compared with the multiple waves of COVID-19 in Europe and North America, the Greater China Region (roughly includes China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan) has represented individual governmental and societal responses to this global pandemic. Despite many cultural and ethnic similarities, three Chinese-majority entities demonstrated their responses to the containment of COVID-19 when the pandemic began to spread in their societies. Our study will derive from the social capital theory to explain how this important variable mediates the spread of the virus (Makridis & Wu, 2021).

Literature Review and Research Questions

            Bourdieu (1986) first defines social capital as "the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance or recognition" (pp. 248-249). Other researchers have defined social capital as "connections among individual social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them" (Putman, 2000, p. 19). Makridis and Wu (2021) argue that social capital contributes to trust and relationships within a community, resulting in whether residents in communities are willing to be considerate of others, to abide by government policies for social distancing, self-quarantine, mask-wearing, and vaccination (Makridis & Wu, 2021). Their empirical study of 2,700 US counties has found that social capital can contribute to a 5.7% to 8% decline in the total number of deaths and infections (Makridis & Wu, 2021). Wong and Kohler's (2020) exploratory research claims that the applications of social capital (ranging from the development of low- and high-risk groups, trust-building between decision-makers and institutions, and virtual community building) can increase the effectiveness of health provision. Additionally, Matijaševic' (2021) employed quantitative data from Lowy Institute's COVID Performance Index and Haerpfer et al.s (2020) World Value Survey and concluded that the level of social capital in a community would contribute to better COVID-19 performance through community building and trust.

            Based on the literature, our study attempts to answer the following questions:

RQ1: How have the three entities in the Great China Region attempted to build social capital and institution trust during COVID-19?

RQ2: What types of social capital that China, Hong-Kong, and Taiwan employ to contain the spread of COVID-19 in their respective society?

RQ3: Are the social capital strategies in the Greater China Region account for their COVID-19 performance?

Method

            This study employs a case study method defined as "an intensive, holistic description and analysis of a single instance, phenomenon, or social unit' (Merriam, 1998, p. 21).  Scholars such as Yin (2009) identify three case study methods: descriptive, explanatory, and exploratory. Our study employs a combination of descriptive and explanatory case study methods to provide a thorough description  (Hamilton & Corbett-Whittier, 2013) of social capital strategies in terms of the COVID-19 containment in the Greater China Region to answer our research questions.