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Article published In:
The Linguistic Landscape of Covid-19
Edited by Jackie Jia Lou, David Malinowski and Amiena Peck
[Linguistic Landscape 8:2/3] 2022
► pp. 248–263

Aggressive banners, dialect-shouting village heads, and their online fame

Construction and consumption of rural Linguistic Landscapes in China’s anti-Covid campaign

ORCID logo | Lingnan University

At the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak in China, the state quickly declared a nationwide anti-Covid campaign. This article looks at how the rural space was transformed during this early anti-Covid campaign. Unlike the official state discourses, rural officials resorted to direct, down-to-earth, and ‘cold-hearted’ messages to persuade the villagers to comply with the rules. Based on a study of widely circulated banners and videos online, drawing on Linguistic Landscape studies and discourse analysis, I investigate the discursive strategies employed in rural LL. Moreover, I discuss how the intended/imagined audiences of these multimodal signing practices are disconnected from the changed rural population. These discrepancies will be further examined in light of the online subcultural practices of ‘tuwei culture’. I will argue that much-needed discussion of the actual difficulties that rural officials face is displaced in the online consumption of rural LL.

Keywords: Covid-19, Linguistic Landscape, discourse, rural governance, health communication, the Chinese internet
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework
  • 3.Data and methods
  • 4.Data analysis
    • 4.1Construction of rural Linguistic Landscapes
    • 4.2Online consumption of rural Linguistic Landscapes
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 September 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ll.21032.zho
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