Resisting Foreign Hostility in China’s English-language News Media during the COVID-19 Crisis

ABSTRACT

Studies of crisis communication have increasingly used a critical approach to shift the focus of research from how crises are managed to the role of social power and ideology, but little is known about the discursive construction of resistance in response to global health crises. To fill this niche, this article uses critical discourse analysis to investigate how China’s state-run media resisted what it deemed to be undue foreign hostility towards China over the spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Based on an analysis of 63 reports in China’s English-language news media, the article finds that the Chinese media developed a discourse of resistance via three main strategies: enemification, victimisation and heroisation. These strategies draw on a variety of linguistic mechanisms, specifically argumentative topoi, nominations, predications and metaphors. The discourse of resistance constructed by the Chinese media has implications for how nationalism and humanitarianism are practised and promoted in China. The article shows that the state-run media constructed a discourse of resistance as part of China’s response to the COVID crisis, to help shape China’s national image and to convey its geopolitical messages to the world.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• discourse of resistance
• critical discourse analysis
• crisis communication
• China’s English-language news media

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by RGC Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme funding (PDFS2122-5H03). I would like to thank Mark Nartey, Huabin Wang, Charlie Charles, the editor David Hundt, and two anonymous reviewers for their very useful comments on an earlier version of this paper.