COVID-19 in China: Imagination and deep mediatization

Abstract

How can we combat the invisible – a virus one can only see with the aid of sophisticated equipment? A virus that has nevertheless managed to put the world on hold, freeze our travelling, and a virus that has killed, at the time of writing – July 2021 – over 4 million people worldwide. A virus, moreover, whose first recorded outbreak started in mainland China at the end of 2019. What seemed like yet another local health crisis soon morphed into a global pandemic. Since the start of the pandemic, China’s role has shifted. Initially, China was the assumed ‘origin’ of the pandemic, and was criticized for its secretive attitude about the source and spread of the virus. Soon after, China’s draconian measures to combat the virus were met with suspicion elsewhere, in particular in the Western media, and were read as a sign of its authoritative regime. Yet, within the timespan of a few months, China’s virus management scored containment successes that overshadowed those of Europe and the United States, feeding internally into a discourse of nationalism in which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was praised by its citizenry as the guardian of the nation. When I considered editing a special issue on the pandemic during the summer of 2020, I had doubts: was it not too much like capitalizing on the contemporary, turning a crisis into a publication opportunity? And what more could be said about COVID-19, given the sheer abundance of both journalistic and academic discourses surrounding the pandemic? However, in the words of John Nguyet Erni and Ted Striphas,