It came from China; it's a Chinese virus’

Bibliographic Data

ID8250083
AuthorsSofia Lampropoulou (0000-0001-9072-1394, University of Liverpool, corresponding author), Paul Cooper (0000-0003-3730-2953, University of Liverpool), Elizabeth Pye (University of Liverpool), Megan Griffiths (University of Liverpool)
Year2023
Volume7
Issue1
Pages94-117
Publication date2023-02-13
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Language and Discrimination (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2397-2645 • E-ISSN: 2397-2637
PublisherEquinox Publishing (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1558/jld.22178
OpenAlexW4320727077
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited31

This study examines the negotiations of racism by Twitter users in the representation of the COVID-19 crisis during the first wave of the pandemic. We focus on expressions that target China as the place where COVID originated such as ‘Chinese virus’ and ‘Kung flu’. The repeated use and discussion of these terms on social media serves to create, establish and reinforce indexical links (Silverstein 2003) to social values, which relate to ideological conceptions of China and Chinese culture. Additionally, Twitter users’ crisis processing involves the renegotiatation of indexical links to social values that coincides with the engagement in sociopolitical debates that frequent online media environments, resulting in sociological fractionation (Agha 2007); the ideological opposition between Twitter user groups involves statements such as ‘Kung flu is racist but COVID originated in China's dirty markets.’ We see such disclaimers as examples of ‘liquid racism’ (Weaver 2011) that, while they are difficult to pin down as racist, they naturalise Sinophobia as the dominant discourse in our dataset. We conclude that racism in our data is a resource embedded in blame attribution that is compatible with crisis processing

Attribution · Blame · China · Ideology · Indexicality · Linguistics · Media studies · Negotiation · Political science · Politics · Racism · Social media · Social science · Sociology · Gender Studies · Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Law · Psychology · Social Media and Politics · Social Psychology

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