Living a diasporic space online: semiotic landscape and landscaping of Chinese students in the UK under COVID pandemic

ABSTRACT

Recent linguistic landscape studies have increasingly underscored an online-offline agenda to understand the entanglement of people’s digital and physical lifeworlds. In this light, this study concerns itself with the diasporic space lived online by Chinese overseas students residing in the UK during COVID, taking it as a nexus of their experienced semiotic landscape and practiced landscaping. Drawing on research diaries and interviews collected during a stretched time of fieldwork and observations, this research delineates shared semiotic landscapes shaped by homogeneous attention structure and health beliefs in the digital lifeworlds of Chinese overseas students during the pandemic. The shared semiotic landscapes reterritorialize the idea of local space in digital infrastructures, and constitute an online community space where cultural identities are articulated and practiced. By advocating the analytical strength of linguistic landscape in digital settings, this study articulates and makes sense of the social-semiotic dynamics of a discrete diasporic group specifically conditioned by COVID on a broader spatial level.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital space
• online linguistic landscape
• diaspora
• study abroad
• Chinese
• COVID

Introduction

Recent conceptual development of digital linguistic landscape studies has been engaged with the online-offline network of texts, signs, objects and experiences centred around social actions (e.g. Maly and Blommaert 2019; Kallen, Dohnnacha, and Wade 2020; Yao 2021). This has not only expanded the scope of linguistic landscape as an analytic approach, but also contested its ontological nature as signs displayed in ‘public space’. In addition to ‘road names, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings’ (25) following the classic definition of linguistic landscape by Landry and Bourhis (1997), digital linguistic landscape also incorporate signs displayed and seen in shared online space which are experientially comparable to the physical ones.

Inspired by this conceptual advancement, this study concerns itself with the diasporic space lived by Chinese students residing in the UK during COVID, taking it as an online-offline nexus where their social, semiotic and spatial experiences and practices are entangled. Drawing on insights gathered through a stretched period of fieldwork, this research examines both experienced semiotic landscapes as well as semiotic landscaping practices in the online lifeworlds of Chinese overseas students, and interprets them with full considerations of challenges brought by COVID due to different social and political dynamics in China and the UK. Revealing a shared cultural space shaped by the group’s homogeneous attention structure and sources of information, the study remarks the polycentric regimes of authority reflected in their culturally distinctive health beliefs and practices. In the meantime, it also emphasises the agency of Chinese overseas students in constructing and maintaining their diasporic space lived online.

In the following section, I will review on the growing body of research about digital linguistic landscape studies which theoretically underpins the exploration into the diasporic space of Chinese overseas students lived in the nexus of physical and digital lifeworlds.

Linguistic landscape in digital space

In recent years, there has been an emerging online-offline agenda in linguistic landscape studies, represented in particular by the work of Maly and Blommaert (2019) in which they closely elaborate Digital Ethnographic Linguistic Landscape Analysis 2.0. As a new methodology to study social actions and space from a post-digital perspective, the proposition is based on the recognition of the digital extension of our everyday lifeworlds and the naturalisation of the pervasive and connected digitality which is now inextricable from the way we live.

To incorporate digital space into the interpretative frame of linguistic landscape, the first theoretical underpinning is the action-centred understanding of ‘the total linguistic fact’ (Silverstein 1985). According to Maly and Blommaert (2019), social actions can be organised and distributed in both online and offline spaces, and social action in offline geographical areas particularly ‘has at least been conditioned and perhaps even made possible by online infrastructures, in terms both of actors and of topography and meaning-making processes’ (2019, 12). This emphasis on social action is connected to the understanding of digital space as sites of display and sites of engagement where people experience and live their own space by structuring their attentions (Jones 2010, 2013). In this sense, attention is not a mere cognitive but also a social construct, whose structure is determined by ‘socially and technologically mediated frames or organizers’ (Jones 2010, 153) resulting from the interaction of discourses, social relationships and individual’s subjectivity in both physical and digital space.

Besides, to view linguistic landscape as online-offline nexus also contests the nature of public space. If digital space are sites of display and engagement, it shall be considered as public space of the online environment where people spend time looking at and socialising with others, and hence are explored and experienced just like physical landscapes (Halonen 2015). Previous linguistic landscape studies have elaborated on this matter such as Shohamy and Waksman’s (2009) work that remarks the blurred boundaries between ‘“private” and “public”, “real” and “virtual”, “space” and “place”’ as they ‘converge and overlap’ (315) in the sphere of cyberspace. Kallen, Dohnnacha, and Wade (2020) directly propose the study on ‘online linguistic landscape’ which is made of digital rather than terrestrial display of images and languages.

Among all digital infrastructures, social media is particularly relevant to online linguistic landscape. Its semiotic affordance as public space per se (not merely the online discourse) has been examined by sociolinguists especially via studies on users’ posting practices on social media platforms. For example, Blackwood (2019) analyses Instagram posters’ use of typologised resources available in Paris Orly Airport (photo of passport, boarding pass, branded goods, etc., uploaded and geotagged in the airport), and argues that the multilingual and multimodal creativities have contributed to the construction of people’s self-presented identities. Yao (2021) studies WeChat Moment (a function of WeChat where users can post texts, images and videos) as online linguistic landscape, and elaborates on the semiotic affordances of participants’ online metrolingual practices in presenting and negotiating their self-identities in ‘collapsed context’ (bounded network of people, information and norm, Marwick and boyd 2011).

Taking digital space as naturalised part of our everyday experiential lifeworlds, this study examines the online-offline nexus of semiotic landscapes experienced and practiced by Chinese overseas students living in the UK during COVID. In the next section, I will justify why this community can be framed as a discrete diasporic group by presenting more contextual information about how Chinese overseas students have lived in between China and the UK during the pandemic.

Chinese overseas students as ‘COVID diaspora’

A growing body of sociolinguistic research has delved into transnational experiences of Chinese students studying abroad (such as Jackson 2019; Wu 2020; Miao and Yang 2022; Tong, An, and Zhou 2022) from various perspectives including language education and development, language and intercultural attitude, translanguaging and translingual identity, etc. Apart from the pedagogic or developmental viewpoints, study abroad as a unique life event itself can also be studied for its broader sociological implications. According to Block (2002), study abroad can form into individual’s critical experience which destabilises one’s sense of self and results in hybridity and ‘third place’ identities. Nevertheless, the examination of this process, as Kinginger (2019) points out, shall properly take broader social and historical conditions and context into accounts in order to fully grasp its operation. In this light, this paper is interested in how study abroad experiences of Chinese students in the UK are influenced by COVID especially how their hybridised transnational identities are conditioned by the global health crisis. In particular, in view of their comparable diasporic experiences as they live in the transnational space between China and the UK under COVID pandemic, I frame these Chinese overseas students as a discrete diasporic group via a digital ethnographic linguistic landscape analysis of their diasporic space lived online.

In face of COVID, Chinese overseas students in general have experienced additional disruptions and stresses as they live in between two cultural spaces. In the early burst of the pandemic since February 2020, the mask-phobia and anti-Chinese even anti-Asian sentiments in the UK brought embodied racism against Chinese community in general (many studies have touched upon the mixed and fluid ideologies associated with mask-wearing, such as Ma and Zhan 2022; Xu et al. 2022). Later on, as cases in the UK soared high and the government issued its first lockdown, many Chinese students ‘fled’ back to China as they were too scared of being infected and thought China was much safer with its effective prevention policies. However, international mobility at the time brought many ‘imported cases’ into China, adding extra burdens to the nationwide ‘zero-Covid’ prevention. This had led to comments against Chinese overseas students, who were being accused of ‘sending the poison from thousands of miles away’ (‘千里投毒’), ‘China is the safest place in the world, but overseas students you better not coming back now’. Since then, the journey going back home became more and more difficult. Flights to China were massively cut off and the remaining ones were quite limited and could be 10 times more expensive. However, this was just the first thing to worry about, as even though one could afford a ‘sky-high priced ticket’ (‘天价机票’), there have also been constant anxieties about staying ‘safe’ in order to obtain negative PCR test result within 24 or for a period of time 12 h before departure. Besides, the trips back to China often involve long transfer hours in airports (direct flights between China and the UK were suspended since 2020 and were just restored in September 2022), wearing N95 mask and even self-contained suit throughout the journey, longtime quarantine in hotel and at home (can be up to 4 weeks in some cases).

In this respect, the experience of Chinese overseas students have been very much ‘diasporic’ considering their transnational living conditions under COVID. According to Brubaker’s (2005) appraisal, there are three core criteria constituting ‘diaspora’ as an analytical concept, i.e. dispersion in space, orientation to a ‘homeland’, and boundary-maintenance. Deviant from traditional understanding, the dispersion is not necessarily forced or traumatic, but rather any form of dispersion crossing state borders. Nonetheless, in the case of Chinese overseas students here, many of them indeed ‘have to’ stay in the UK as journey back home are very much put off by expensive flight tickets, longtime quarantine and other stresses involved in travel logistics. In face of the disruptions and challenges brought by the crisis, Chinese overseas students tended to stay tightly connected and oriented (at least during the time of fieldwork) to the homeland largely via their digital lifeworlds. Specifically, their experienced semiotic landscapes are found to contribute to their culturally distinctive health beliefs, and further influence their practices to actively maintain social distance and cultural boundary.

Besides, Brubaker also emphasises that,

we should think of diaspora not in substantialist terms as a bounded entity, but rather as an idiom, a stance, a claim … a category of practice used to make claims, to articulate projects, to formulate expectations, to mobilise energies, to appeal to loyalties. It does not so much describe the world as seek to remake it (Brubaker 2005, 12, my emphasis).

Resonating with this way of understanding, previous studies have particularly underscored the importance of social media communication in building online community space, particularly the emotional bonding among transnational Chinese-speaking diaspora during COVID crisis (see Zhang and Zhao 2020; Jang and Choi 2020). In this light, I would also emphasise the agency of Chinese overseas students not only in mobilising and articulating their diasporic identity, but also in constructing and maintaining an online diasporic community via their semiotic landscaping practices.

Bearing these understandings in mind, this study is specifically concerned with three questions:

1. How are semiotic landscapes experienced by Chinese overseas students online weaved as they live in between China and the UK during COVID?

2. How do the perceived semiotic landscapes come to shape their stances and beliefs, which are enacted and embodied in their discursive and spatial practices online?

3. How do these practices further contribute to the construction and maintenance of their online diasporic space?

Data

Data collection of this research starts off with a 6-month fieldwork from August 2020 to January 2021 when the author was recruited as a participant-researcher for a project that aimed to understand challenges faced by Chinese university students studying in the UK during COVID. It adopted a community-based participatory framework in which participant-researchers (who are all Chinese students living in the UK themselves) were very much empowered in agenda setting, data collection and analysis, and research dissemination. The role as both participant and researcher has not only made me become more self-conscious and reflective about my everyday life such as media use and communicative practices, but since then also enabled me to keep an observant eye towards the general living conditions and experiences of Chinese students living in the UK during the extended COVID age.

During the fieldwork, I kept a weekly research diary recording and documenting my experiences and observations related to the general research topic. In the meantime, I also formally engaged with 16 registered international students from China studying at different universities in London via either individual or focus group interviews. The goals were to enter the lifeworlds of Chinese overseas students in concrete living details and to approach the collective experiences of the community in face of the pandemic. Data were then coded and organised manually during which themes about media use, attention structure and cultural identity emerged as key questions of investigation.

Overall, this paper presents an emic and introspective perspective, largely relying on an auto-ethnography of my personal experiences and reflexivity in terms of both data collection and interpretation. In light of previous methodological discussions on the validity and strength of researcher’s own experiences and narratives as empirical evidence (such as Ellis and Bochner 2000; Adams, Ellis, and Jones 2017), I believe that the dual positionality of ‘the observer’ and ‘the observed’ can provide intimate familiarity with the community and hence in-depth insights to reveal the texture of social realities associated with the proposed research questions. By situating my own subjectivity in concrete living details of Chinese oversea students living in the UK, I also hope to expose and discuss the underrepresented complexities and dynamics behind the diasporic realities experienced by Chinese overseas students during the pandemic.

Findings

Excerpt 1 is extracted from a focus group interview conducted on 18th August 2020, with five Chinese overseas students studying in various universities in London during the 2019–2020 academic year. All of the five participants have stayed in the UK throughout the time, and hence are the patch who have experienced both the ‘good old days’ of the normal university life, and the outbreak and crisis of the pandemic.

Table

Excerpt 1
Turn	Speaker	English translation
1	Author:	Where do you read news normally, and where do you get information about COVID?
2	Ming:	Sources of information are mostly from China, and in detail. Here in the UK, I sometimes read BBC News where there are many local information. But about how to stay safe under COVID it’s mostly from Chinese sources. I think China is more advanced in this term.
3	Su:	Chinese sources include Weibo … and WeChat. I think WeChat combines the situations of both China and UK. Many of the information is targeted at Chinese overseas students, about COVID, about policies and regulations, etc., but in Chinese. It feels like relevant information has already been collected and organised by someone.(Emission of turns)
6	Author:	Yang, I think you have something to say?
7	Yang:	Yes, I just feel that [laughing] we are all the same, we are really the same, because I also read WeChat. I just checked the public accounts I subscribed, ‘UK Alarm’, ‘UK Red Scarf’, ‘UK Giraffe’ …
8	Gong:	… Also WeChat group chat. I think group chat is very influential among Chinese overseas students. One person finds out something, everybody knows about it at once as well.

This clip of talk is about participants’ media use during the turbulent time of COVID outbreak mainly from March to June 2020 (UK’s first lockdown), and reflects some general features of semiotic landscapes experienced online by Chinese overseas students. In turn 2 and 3, two participants, Ming and Su, share their sources of information which are mostly comprised of Chinese social media such as WeChat (the most popular messaging and social media app in China) and Weibo (China’s biggest microblogging platform), supplemented by few UK media such as BBC news. In turn 2 particularly, Ming explicitly states her trust of Chinese sources over those from the UK, as she thinks China is more ‘advanced’ based on China’s nationwide zero-COVID prevention at the time.

Su further specifies in turn 3 the popularity and influence of WeChat public accounts (a built-in media feed platform) since they not only collect useful information relevant to Chinese overseas students but also redistribute them in Chinese language, so that they are both information and language broker. Her statement is aligned by Yang in turn 6, ‘I just feel that we are all the same, we are really the same’, as they read the newsfeed largely from same WeChat public accounts such as ‘UK Red Scarf’, ‘UK Giraffe’, etc., which have been collecting, organising and sharing latest situations, policies and regulations of both China and the UK.

In addition, another participant Gong also emphasises the influential power of WeChat group chat among Chinese overseas students, stating that ‘when one person finds out something, everyone else knows about it all at once’. The type of group chats Gong refers to is normally formed by people attending the same university/school or living in the same residence, and members are in most cases strangers to each other as the size can amount to 500 people. Besides, at the time of COVID outbreak, remaining Chinese students who decide to stay in the UK also create new group chats very often named ‘守望互助群’ (‘mutual support group’). In this sense, Gong’s statement here has highlighted not only the impact of WeChat group chat as shared public space, but also the agentive and performative role of Chinese overseas students in shaping and constructing their diasporic space.

Overall, the discussion reflects shared semiotic landscapes of Chinese overseas students operating at their digital living space. The semiotic landscapes experienced online are marked by polarised and polycentric regimes of authority, secondary broker sources with processed and filtered information, as well as more decentralised and self-mediated in-group circulations. The shared semiotic landscapes are structured by their common living conditions and similar matters of concern during COVID. At the outbreak of COVID in the UK, the general sentiments among Chinese overseas students were fear and anxiety towards the disease, and strong disappointment and mistrust towards UK government’s plan of herd immunity. Therefore, loads of them fled back to China to run away from the UK, a place contaminated with the deadly virus (a popular slang at the time is ‘跑毒’, meaning ‘running away from the virus/poison’). For those who couldn’t return home, they had to face directly with the uncertainties and turbulence and rely solely on themselves to stay safe. As such, their shared living conditions and concerns had led to shared attention structures, so that they spent time browsing similar social media platforms to know about the general situations of both their homeland and the current ‘home’, to learn and share tips and measures about how to stay safe in the UK, to gather latest information about flight to China, and very importantly, to stay connected with other fellow Chinese overseas students by interacting with each other such as sharing information or simply comforting even complaining together.

Their shared semiotic landscapes and consequent connectivity in the digital lifeworlds have contributed to an enclosed community space in which cultural distinctions and social boundaries are articulated and practiced. Extracted from my research diary on 21st October 2020, Excerpt 2 presents an episode taking place in a student residence where I lived at the time.

Table

Excerpt 2

Today, in our WeChat group (of Chinese students living in the residence), there is news about two ‘foreign’ guys tested positive in Flat 601. This has boosted heated complaints in the group. People living on the 6th floor feel so wronged and angry, because their foreign flat mates often gather and party irresponsibly: ‘people squeezed in every corner of kitchen’, ‘yelling like ghost till 4 am’. Others feel sorry for them, and suggest that they shall change into a new flat or call the police directly (as their flatmates breach ‘the rule of six’). This has brought wider discussions about the mutual trust among Chinese students. Some says, ‘Chinese students shall be allocated in the same building’, another responds ‘at least living in the same floor’. Others give comments such as ‘it’s so good to live with more Chinese’, receiving general agreements and alignments in the group.

To make sense of this episode, the polarised and polycentric semiotic landscape experienced by Chinese overseas students online should be recalled again, as it has fundamentally shaped their health beliefs and ideologies deviant from the host community. In 2020 when most people were not yet vaccinated, the general sentiments among Chinese overseas students were largely the anxiety and fear about being infected by the ‘deadly’ coronavirus, even though young people were actually not as vulnerable as the elders. As a result, Chinese students in general tended to care very much about self-protection and staying safe, and thus practice very rigid preventive measures, such as wearing mask all the time even in outdoor space, maintaining extended social distance and in some cases self-isolation, strict disinfection of hands, grocery, clothes, etc. However, health ideologies and practices in UK local community were in fact different from theirs. In particular, instead of seeing the preventive measures against COVID as necessary acts to protect themselves, their foreign peers tended to frame these acts as being responsible to others such as their grandparents and hence a personal sacrifice for the society. As such, Chinese overseas students would take the stance against them ‘the foreigners’ who were less careful or even ‘careless’ which would put everybody’s safety at risk; meanwhile in favour of the cohabitation and socialisation with we Chinese who shared similar mindsets as to self-protection. In this sense, the shared health ideologies and practices have contributed to the mutual trust and in-group alignment among Chinese overseas students, especially in terms of their management of social space.

Another observation here is about WeChat group chat as a safe public space where Chinese overseas students can explicitly express their negative feelings (worried, wronged, angry, etc.) and dissatisfactions towards their ‘foreign’ peers sometimes even in xenophobic and hostile languages, exerting a kind of symbolic violence in their acts of cultural distinctions (c.f. Zhu, Jones, and Jaworska 2022). The mentality would be their framing of the group chat as an in-group space where we Chinese can actually understand each other in terms of ‘what I’m talking about’ and ‘why I’m so worried and angry’ at the ‘foreigners’.

In the last example, I will discuss the popularity of another social media platform among Chinese overseas student, Redbook (‘小红书’), and illustrate how it has facilitated in-group connections of an ‘imagined community’. Excerpt 3 is extracted from my research diary on 23rd August 2020, in which I reflect on my personal use of social media since the outbreak of COVID, especially my self-consciousness of media use as concrete experiential reality and its impact projected onto my sense of self and social space.

Table

Excerpt 3

Recently, I’m increasing addicted to ‘Redbook’ in my ‘wake-up browsing’ routine. My interests now are more about local information about London and UK, such as where to go and where to dine out (shared by other Chinese overseas students) … ‘Red book’ is more about ordinary persons sharing their own lives, which always makes me feel more connected. This connectedness is with London and UK, both in terms of the place where I actually live in, and the values and stances of the place. A lack of this sense of connectedness would make me feel being ‘forgotten’ like the period when I had to live alone to ‘stay safe’. I think the reason why I felt being ‘forgotten’ and ‘disconnected’ is because, the community I imagined during that time is not the real community I’m actually in.

Since July 2020 (shortly after UK government lifted its first lockdown), I became increasingly aware of the need to stay ‘connected’ while staying ‘safe’ from COVID, and seemed to find a way to keep the balance by managing my ‘mediascape’. Keeping browsing WeChat public accounts and Zhihu (Chinese equivalent of Quora) as my daily routine, I started to consciously engage myself with more locally relevant content not only via BBC news but also via Redbook. Featuring user-generated contents and algorithm-driven distribution, Redbook is a Chinese content sharing platform combing Facebook, Instagram and TikTok with a dose of Taobao. Originally making its name known through celebrities sharing their daily lives and making personal recommendations for products, Redbook has been heavily focused on building trust and facilitating community interactions. Apart from browsing, readers can also engage with the content via follow, like, bookmark, share, private message, and comment, and hence often turn the post into a public discussing forum. Besides, based on its advanced algorithm, Redbook also tailors its feeds based on user’s location, searching history, subscribed contents, etc. Therefore, as public space, Redbook is very different from other social media such as WeChat Moment or Weibo: it connects strangers but in meantime presents authentic and relatable persona, and its rather intelligent algorithmic design helps curate very locally and personally relevant semiotic landscape which in a sense creates an ‘algorithmic localism’.

For example, my flow of semiotic landscape on Redbook is very much constituted of contents posted and shared by other fellow Chinese overseas students about every possible aspects of life in the UK, such as useful information and suggestions about what to do at weekend, where to go for a dine-out, which shops are currently on sale, how to apply for Schengen visa in the UK, what to do if you lost your travel document, how job-hunting is like this year, etc. Very often I will see posts put online by people I actually know, and once upon a time I even saw myself in a stranger’s video of a street performance in Covent Garden. According to participants’ reports and informal conversations with other Chinese overseas students, Redbook in many cases is the first place they turn to in order to gather the most up-to-dated information and seek helps from other fellows about their studies and lives in the UK. For instance, when one plans to travel back to China, in Redbook he or she can search and then be ‘fed’ with information about which flight itineraries are available and their corresponding regulations and requirements, where to get reliable and good-valued PCR test before departure, even how the quarantine hotels would look like in the arriving city, etc.

In this sense, as I reflect in excerpt 3, space like Redbook has constituted a social place where Chinese overseas students are connected as a community while they live in between China and the UK. Of note is that this community space is imagined through the medium of digital infrastructures made up of not only the platform but also its algorithmic localism, as contents posted by and distributed to Chinese students living in the UK have constituted the semiotic landscape of a reterritorialized ‘local’ space. The digital connectivity can also be layered on and extended to the material world, as seen in Figure 1 an interesting example in this regard.

Figure 1. ‘The most popular paddling on Redbook’. Photo taken on 8th August 2022.

The photo was taken in Cambridge, right over River Cam showing an advertising board about ‘the most popular river paddling on Redbook’ (‘小红书最火的游船’). The Chinese-only sign suggests that its target audiences are mainly Chinese (to visit Cambridge is on top of the to-do-list for almost every Chinese overseas students). The motivation behind the sign is clearly not the promotion of Redbook, but rather an appropriation of its impact to indicate a safe choice among many other options, which has been widely ‘verified’ and ‘endorsed’ by other members in ‘your’ community. In this sense, digital semiotic landscapes enter the material world in which they can orient people in physical space and influence their spatial decisions. This mixture of materiality and digitality constitute an important basis for the relational diasporic space of Chinese overseas students.

Discussion

In line with previous literature on digital linguistic landscape studies, findings of this paper have demonstrated the organisation and distribution of social actions in the online-offline nexus of ‘public’ space as sites of display and engagement. Specifically, the shared living conditions and matters of concern during COVID have led to shared attention structure of the online semiotic landscapes experienced and practiced by Chinese overseas students in the UK. The shared semiotic landscapes in their online lifeworlds have built up a cultural space for the community to maintain not only ingroup connections and alignments especially social and emotional bonding, but also distance and boundary from the hosting context to mark a cultural distinction. In this sense, the spatiality of this online diasporic space is comparable to physical community space like Chinatown, in which semiotic landscapes also act as discursive frame to facilitate in-group connections and communications (see Zhao 2021). The operation of this online diasporic space is dependent on digital infrastructures especially the imagination of space and place in digitalities. The agency of technology such as algorithm-driven flow of user-generated contents has not only contributed to a reterritorialized locality connecting Chinese overseas students in the digital-material world, but also enabled a flat and democratic participation in the semiotic landscaping of the community space.

This paper is concerned with new realities and phenomenon brought by COVID, focusing on the study abroad experience of Chinese students deviant from a pedagogic or developmental perspective. Based on ethnographic observations and interpretations firmly grounded in social and ideological dynamics of two cultural spaces during COVID, Chinese oversea students are framed as a discrete diasporic group with their intensified ‘third-place’ identities. Besides, by underscoring a diasporic space lived online via people’s experienced semiotic landscapes and practiced semiotic landscaping in Chinese-mediated social media, this study also hopes to contribute to the online-offline agenda in linguistic landscape studies.

Conclusion

Taking digital space as naturalised part of our everyday experiential lifeworlds, this study examines the diasporic space lived online by Chinese overseas students in the UK during COVID. By examining the social-semiotic dynamics of this discrete diasporic group on a broader spatial level, this study reflects the nature of public space and demonstrates the analytical strength of linguistic landscape in digital settings. Besides, as a response to COVID pandemic that has fundamentally changed the way the world is organised and imagined, this research also hopes to enhance the understanding of social realities conditioned by the global health crisis especially in terms of transnational mobility and contacts. The contestations of diverging ideologies and policies against the global pandemic have brought unique challenges to people living in between different cultural spaces, and to engage with these experiences and complexities is important to fully make sense of COVID as a critical event in our era.

Despite its endeavor ‘to think with our story instead of about it’ (Ellis and Bochner 2000, 735), this research bears the limitation of the unavoidable intrusion of my own subjectivity especially in its autoethnographic accounts and analysis. Future research in this line may well consider and acknowledge the bias while achieving intimate familiarity with the studied group. Besides, researchers interested in the consequence and influence of the pandemic in Chinese context may scrutinise the fluidity of ideologies and stances among Chinese speaking communities in the extended COVID age, as health ideologies in China have undergone transformative shifts and the government is adopting rapid policy changes to cope with the pandemic by the time this paper is drafted.

Acknowledgements

Data of the paper were largely collected when the author worked as a Research Assistant for the project ‘Quarantined between cultures: Overcoming communication challenges and building resilience among Chinese students residing in the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic’. The project was funded by British Academy (grant number COV19/201470), led by Professor Rodney Jones (University of Reading), Professor Zhu Hua (University of Birmingham; UCL Institute of Education), and Dr. Sylvia Jaworska (University of Reading). I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my mentors for their guidance, advice, support, and warm encouragement both during and after the project, especially their kind permissions to let me use data I collected during the project in this paper. My thanks also extend to my colleagues: Dr. Wang Yi, Cecilia Duan, Liu Kaihua, and Ni Weihan. Regular meetings and discussions with the team have not only inspired the development of this paper, but also brought connections and friendships that are invaluable to build up my own resilience and well-being at the difficult time. I would also like to thank my participants who have shared details of their life with me in interviews and informal discussions with trust and faith that I can make their voices heard. Their experiences and stories have shed light on every word of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by British Academy [grant number COV19/201470; Project Investigators: Professor Rodney Jones, Professor Zhu Hua, Dr. Sylvia Jaworska]