ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the way initial months of the COVID-19 were remembered on internet debates among Chinese netizens. It will mainly draw from online documents censored or endangered to be censored in China, which are accessible via the telegram channel “2019 COVID-19 News Cyberpunk Graveyard.” We will show how the initial memories of the pandemic as a national failure came into being, were negotiated, and were rewritten by the official propaganda, foreign media, and cybernationalists. We will use two examples to show how a collective amnesia of the initial experiences of failure were produced through the new media in China: debates on the death of Doctor Li Wenliang and on Fang Fang’s Diary. As we will argue, the narratives of national failure and of national victory are equally based on an internationalized yet regulated structure of new media and the logic of such new media discourse. The advancement of new media and online platforms in present-day China is remarkably conducive to exposing sociopolitical realities that do not fit into official narratives, while disseminating reflexive commentary. Yet it also makes it equally convenient for these “truths” to be enrolled into an online propaganda discourse and allows the rise of cyber-nationalism.
