Despicable “Them” and Innocent “Us”: Emotion Politics in the Time of Pandemic

• In Event: China's Propaganda Apparatus

Abstract

Emotion plays an important role in political mobilisation, especially in the time of a public health crisis, such as Covid-19 (de Kloet et al., 2021; Renström & Bäck, 2021). The past two years has spelt a high time for Chinese government’s international and domestic emotion management. Drawing on the scholarship of emotion politics and nationalism, this research attempts to investigate the mechanism for CCP’s Party Press to mobilise emotions in its coverage of the global pandemic for the purpose of evoking political nationalistic identification with the Chinese political system and the CCP’s authoritarian rule.
The research selected Global Times for its popularity, foreign news focus and nationalistic tone (Larson, 2011; Zeng & Sparks, 2020). We collected 256 articles from Global Times’ social media account (WeChat account). The timeframe is set between 20.01.2020 to 16.02.2021 as that covers the whole period that Covid-19 emerged as news and escalated into a global pandemic. The samples were selected upon three criteria: (1) Involving Covid-19 related news; (2) Containing at least one certain foreign country; (3)Containing a certain level of commentary, which means pure news bulletins were excluded. Combining Ekman's (1992) and Parrott's (2000) taxonomy, the research identified 7 emotions: Praise, Joy, Anger, Fear, Sadness, Disgust, and Surprise. The coders coded not only emotions but the subject nation that projected the emotions and the object that certain emotions were directed towards.
Our preliminary findings are twofold:
First, we found that positive emotions such as “praise”, “joy” have been mobilised to legitimise the Chinese government’s pandemic management policy as well as negative emotions such as “fear”, “anger” and “disgust” to cultivate a collective victimhood and a sense of superiority about the Chinese socio-political system over Western ones.

Second, applying a network analysis on the subject nations, object nations and the emotions that connect different actors, we found that the United States and China were the major emotion projector and recipient. At the beginning stage of the pandemic, China served as the main target to be feared, as foreign countries expressed concern for China’s concealment of information or pandemic mismanagement. With the pandemic unfolding, China and the US became mutual targets for discursive attacks imbued with the disgust emotion. While Chinese criticisms of the US clustered on the inefficiency of the US public health governmental agencies, American dissatisfaction of China concentrated on the problem of the virus’ origins and the authoritarian measures taken regarding the pandemic. Not surprisingly, the US became the focus of the anger emotion, with the most noticeable amount of rage coming from the American people, who are represented by the Global Times as expressing a furious attitude against the government’s incapacity and mismanagement during the pandemic under the Trump administration.

The research argues that the Chinese press applied emotion politics to spatialise the world into emotion-laden regions, wherein an affective line is drawn between a “despicable” them and an innocent “us”. While negative emotions such as “fear”, “disgust” and “anger” are also reported to be directed towards China, counternarratives were developed to deflect the blame as a geopolitical game intended to undermine and weaken China, and endorsement from international actors such as friendly nations and international organisations are exploited to enhance the regime’s legitimacy as well as a sense of complacency of the Chinese political system. It makes methodological contribution to integrate network analysis in digging out the emotional connection among different actors in media coverage.

Bibliography
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Zeng, W., & Sparks, C. (2020). Popular nationalism: Global Times and the US–China trade war. International Communication Gazette, 82(1), 26–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/1748048519880723

Author

• Chang Zhang, Communication University of China