Covid-19 Triumphalism in China’s 2020 Docudramas
Just as Trump vociferated throughout 2020 regarding the “Chinese Virus” and “Kung Flu,” China was slowly turning international bad publicity to its advantage. Weiji, or crisis in the Chinese language, comprises two words: danger and opportunity. Flipping the former into the latter, Chinese propaganda for domestic consumption does not help Asian minorities in the United States; rather, they exacerbate Sinophobia within U.S. conservative media and the echo chamber of nearly half of U.S. voters favouring Trumpism in the 2020 presidential and congressional elections. From the perspective of an Asian immigrant in the United States, one who had pledged the unnatural “Naturalization Oath” of renouncing “all [former] allegiance and fidelity,” Covid-19 encapsulates a quandary, sharpening one’s identity, shall we say, neither here nor there. (“Former” implied in the oath may as well be “formal,” as informal—affective and psychic—filaments linger long after overt political acts.) In the eyes of the fatherland, those […]