Spaces of care and resistance in China: public engagement during the COVID-19 outbreak

ABSTRACT

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to unfold, the approach of the Chinese government remains under the spotlight, obscuring the complex landscape of responses to the outbreak within the country. Drawing upon the author’s social media experiences as well as textual analysis of a wide range of sources, this paper explores how the Chinese public responded to the outbreak in complex and nuanced ways through social media. The findings challenge conventional views of Chinese social media as simply sites of self-censorship and surveillance. On the contrary, during the COVID-19 outbreak, social media became spaces of active public engagement, in which Chinese citizens expressed care and solidarity, engaged in claim-making and resistance, and negotiated with authorities. This paper situates this public engagement within a broader context of China’s health-care reforms, calling attention to persistent structural and political issues, as well as the precarious positionalities of health-care workers within the health system.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• social media
• China
• virtual spaces
• health geographies
• health care workers
• negotiation

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Kam Wing Chan, Tim Oakes, and Craig Young for their useful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. All direct quotations in this paper were translated by the author.

2. Lilac Garden’s official website (in Chinese) can be accessed through http://www.dxy.cn/. This virtual community is renowned for its many online forums and official WeChat accounts with various health-related missions such as health education and awareness, activism and advocacy, health research, and disease diagnosis and analysis.

3. Shimo Document (石墨文档): https://shimo.im/sheets/hPg9t9xT6GtkC3p8/MODOC.

4. The Timeline was made by independent Chinese media companies called Caixin (http://www.caixin.com/?HOLDZH) and YiMagazine (https://www.yicai.com/) which documented critical events and identified some milestones reported by the health community, the National Health Commission, Hubei authorities, and Responses outside of mainland China (i.e. Hong Kong and WHO), between December 1st, 2019 and January 23, 2020. To avoid censorship, this timeline was saved as a picture and circulated widely on social media.

5. IPE has established the Blue Map (https://www.ipe.org.cn/MapGZBD/GZBDMap.html) that facilitates real-time update of the epidemic as well as comprehensive data analysis.

6. According to another report by the Beijing News, Li’s death was identified as an occupational accident. His family was compensated with a one-time injury subsidy (785,020 RMB/US$11,000) and a funeral subsidy (36,834 RMB/US$5200) (The Beijing News 2020).