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Article published In: Chronotopes and the COVID-19 Pandemic
Edited by Anna De Fina and Sabina M. Perrino
[Language, Culture and Society 4:2] 2022
► pp. 110–135

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“This is China’s Wailing Wall”

Chronotopes and the configuration of Li Wenliang on Weibo

 | University of Alabama
 | China Digital Times
Published online: 2 December 2022
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/lcs.22002.pri
Abstract
Dr. Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, was accused of spreading rumors when he sent a WeChat message containing the diagnostic report of a suspicious pneumonia case to a group of friends. When he later died from COVID-19, his Weibo page quickly become known as “China’s Wailing Wall,” where hundreds of thousands of netizen shared replies to his final post in a mega-thread that continues into the present. Drawing upon a selection of posts from an archive of messages posted to Li’s Weibo in the year following his death, this article examines how participants used chronotopes (Bhaktin 1981) to situate Li vis-à-vis various culturally salient “figures of personhood” (Agha, A. (2005). Voice, Footing, Enregisterment. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 15(1), 38–59. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Park, J. S.-Y. (2021). Figures of Personhood: Time, Space, and Affect as Heuristics for Metapragmatic Analysis. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2021(272), 47–73. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), including “moral hero,” “kin figure,” and/or “deity.” Our analysis further suggests how such positioning, as a response to grief and uncertainty, “moved” authors into a position of distance from hegemonic national chronotopes situating people in a symbiotic relationship of mutual care with the Chinese state. Our analysis thus offers insight into the ways in which collective crises have the capacity to (but do not necessarily) motivate a complex discursive and relational process through which interlocutors enact scalar intimacy (Pritzker, S. E., & Perrino, S. (2020). Culture Inside: Scale, Intimacy, and chronotopic Stance in Personal Narratives. Language in Society, 501, 365–387. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) as they grapple with shifts in their felt experience of nationhood and/or “culture.”
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical Foundations
  • 3.Data and Methods
  • 4.Formulating Li as a Moral Hero
  • 5.Formulating Li as a Kin Figure
  • 6.Formulating Li as a Deity
  • 7.Concluding Reflections
  • Acknowledgements
  • Endnotes
  • References
References (56)
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