Collective identity construction in the covid-19 crisis

Since the pandemic broke out in 2020, China has widely presented the covid crisis in its mass media and actively constructed collective identity thereof to mobilize medical workers, unify political stances, boost domestic solidarity, and promote international support. This paper combines the Discourse-Historical Approach and a multimodal perspective to investigate how the Chinese state-run news agency People’s Daily discursively achieves these purposes on TikTok. A combination of qualitative and quantitative methods is used to present the high-frequency topoi of justifying the crisis and referential and predicational strategies of shaping collective identity within, which can fall into four dimensions: positive Self, negative Self, negative Others, and positive Others. The linguistic resources can be intensified/mitigated by visual-aural ensembles, which can draw the audience’s attention and arouse their emotional attachments. This study also summarizes the embedded values in the discourses and situates them in socio-political contexts.