ABSTRACT
During the COVID-19 pandemic, some Chinese immigrants in the Western societies find themselves torn between two public health approaches: China’s authoritarian approach and the host societies’ more lenient one. Some new Chinese immigrants understand the global public health responses by using Chinese transnational media (CTM), which often link them to discourses popular in China. This chapter focuses on anti-Western CTM, which portray the Western governments to be irresolute and irresponsible, in contrast to a capable, trustworthy Chinese government. This chapter argues that such differential portrayals play a role in China’s ongoing wrestling with the West, on the one hand, and constructing new Chinese immigrants’ diasporic belongings on the other. This chapter performs discourse analysis and narrative analysis on CTM in the forms of news reports, online forums, and social media in Western societies, supplemented by fieldwork conducted in Canada. I argue that when applying various common media strategies, such as othering and disinformation, anti-Western CTM adeptly taps into cultural differences regarding, for example, one’s sense of conformity to the government and the habit of mask-wearing, to engender desired political identification. Capitalizing on new Chinese immigrants’ unsettled belongings amid the COVID-19 crisis, anti-Western CTM catalyzes a significant part of the trend of deglobalization.
