This is China’s Wailing Wall
Chronotopes and the configuration of Li Wenliang on Weibo
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7213587 |
|---|---|
| Authors | E Pritzker (0000-0003-1713-4470, University of Alabama, corresponding author), Sonya E Pritzker, Tony Hu (0000-0002-5166-4937, China Digital Times) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 4 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 110-135 |
| Publication date | 2022-12-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Language Culture and Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2543-3156 • E-ISSN: 2543-3164 |
| Publisher | John Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL) |
| DOI | 10.1075/lcs.22002.pri |
| OpenAlex | W4313214672 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 8 |
| References cited | 31 |
Dr. Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, was accused of spreading rumors when he sent a WeChat message containing the diagnostic report of a suspicious pneumonia case to a group of friends. When he later died from COVID-19, his Weibo page quickly become known as “China’s Wailing Wall,” where hundreds of thousands of netizen shared replies to his final post in a mega-thread that continues into the present. Drawing upon a selection of posts from an archive of messages posted to Li’s Weibo in the year following his death, this article examines how participants used chronotopes (Bhaktin 1981) to situate Li vis-à-vis various culturally salient “figures of personhood” ( Agha 2005 ; Park 2021 ), including “moral hero,” “kin figure,” and/or “deity.” Our analysis further suggests how such positioning, as a response to grief and uncertainty, “moved” authors into a position of distance from hegemonic national chronotopes situating people in a symbiotic relationship of mutual care with the Chinese state. Our analysis thus offers insight into the ways in which collective crises have the capacity to (but do not necessarily) motivate a complex discursive and relational process through which interlocutors enact scalar intimacy ( Pritzker and Perrino 2020 ) as they grapple with shifts in their felt experience of nationhood and/or “culture
Aesthetics · Art · China · Collective unconscious · Grief · Hegemony · HERO · Literature · Media studies · Personhood · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Salient · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Asian Studies and History · History · Law · Philippine History and Culture · Psychology
Beyond physical boundaries? Platformed grief, algorithmic governance, and the co-construction of mourning in the social media era
Creative digital resistance on China’s Virtual Wailing Wall
Sacred ordinariness
Just chronotopes
Genre borrowing in Chinese digital culture
From the "spectacle" to "all for show
Patriotic rabbits or toxic men? Media ideology, entextualization, and enregisterment on Chinese interfaces
What's going on with my China
Signs of Difference
Discourse Analysis beyond the Speech Event
Zhu Xi on Spirit Beings
Sounding Islam
Temporal Reference in Mandarin Chinese
Future of US-China Relations
“Let’s Go, Baby Forklift!”
The Souls of China
The Moral Hero
Atmospheres and the Experiential World
Vulnerability in Resistance
A revisit of ‘moral and character education’ subject in junior-high school in China
From the Soil
Language and Social Relations
Figures of personhood
A phenomenology of whiteness
Culture inside
Voice, Footing, Enregisterment
Sounds of Democracy
The living, the dead, and the immanent
Language, Emotion, and the Politics of Vulnerability
White Allies and the Semiotics of Wokeness
Changing God, Changing Bodies
What's going on with my China
| Unique citing works | 8 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2,67 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2026 (4) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 8 |