Although the Covid-19 outbreak quickly became a pandemic with global consequences, the outbreak’s origins in Wuhan, China has had important implications for how the disease has been perceived. In particular, as the coronavirus was spreading infectiously within China and around the world, a variety of different social media platforms have played a crucial role not only in helping facilitate the circulation of information and misinformation about the virus itself, but also in linking the virus to pro- and anti-Chinese sentiment, while simultaneously offering alternate forms of companionship at a time when many people were struggling with extreme social isolation.

This panel, accordingly, will focus not only on the volatile issue of the virus’s ethno-national connotations, but also on the distinctive role that social and digital media have played in shaping people’s response to the pandemic. While scholarship on socio-cultural responses to the pandemic is quickly becoming a vast sub-field in its own right (and several of our panelists have already published numerous pieces on the topic), our panel will focus more specifically on the pandemic’s relationship to China and tropes of Chineseness, together with its imbrication with the nascent but increasingly important phenomenon of Chinese social media.

In the panel’s first presentation, Carlos Rojas considers some convergences between epidemiological approaches to infectious disease, on one hand, and the viral circulation of cultural tropes, on the other. While drawing on general theories of memes and viral culture, Rojas also looks more specifically at how metaphors of infectiousness have been mobilized within Chinese discussions of the putative harm and potential benefit of popular culture. Next, Michael Berry examines Wuhan Diary, an online diary written and published by Wuhan-based author Fang Fang during the first month of the Wuhan’s crackdown, together with the tsunami of nationalistic critique that the diary almost immediately incited. In the wake of the diary’s disappearance in China, a new series of “politically correct” diaries arose to take its place and attempted to reframe the narrative of Covid-19 in Wuhan. Berry discusses the discourse wars that played out around Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary and the series of alternative “Wuhan Diaries” that proliferated in 2020, together with their attempts to recast the official narrative of Covid-19.

Third, Shiqi Lin analyzes the rise of the podcast culture in China during the pandemic, tracing how Chinese podcasts first boomed in the outbreak of the pandemic as a means of permitting their users to establish sonic intimacy and imagined companionship against the solitude of quarantine. Lin contends that these podcasts were particularly significant at a moment when fragmentation, exhaustion, and rupture became the defining characteristics of media politics. Finally, Belinda Kong considers how the pandemic—and particularly the political promotion of the “China virus” slur—has contributed to a wave of anti-Chinese and anti-Asian violence in the US. In addition to highlighting the continued instrumentalization of Asian Americans as a racial wedge by both conservative and liberal media coverage on Covid, Kong explores how the trope of Trump racism and strategic citations of his “China virus” slur function in relation to that same instrumentalist logic, and asks whether the more recent “second wave” of violence targeting elderly Asian Americans gets couched within the same discursive dynamics, especially given concurrent discourses of senior populations’ heightened vulnerability.

The panel’s format will be a hybrid of a traditional conference panel and a roundtable. We will open with 7-minute presentations by each of the four panelists (with longer versions of the essays posted in advance on the MLA Commons site), followed by approximately 20 minutes of discussion between the panelists and the presider, and concluding with another 25 minutes of open discussion with the audience. Finally, given that at least one of our panelists and many members of our target audience are likely to be in China and East Asia in January 2022, at a time when international travel may still be very constrained, we recommend that this panel be broadcast via a teleconferencing platform (though an in-person, hybrid model is also an option).