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

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.

在中国爆发 Covid-19 之初，全国迅速宣布进入紧急抗疫状态。本文着重研究抗疫期间的农村语言景观。与官方话语不同，农村干部诉诸直截了当、甚至“无情”的话语来说服村民遵守各项防疫规定。基于网络热传的农村抗疫横幅和广播以及引发的官媒和非官媒的相关讨论，本文阐释农村语言景观中采用的话语策略。根据本文的分析，这些多模态，多媒体的抗疫宣传内容所设定的受众与现实中的农村人口脱节。农村人口的各种变化在“土味文化”中表现尤为显著。本文指出在“网络狂欢”中，农村干部面临的各种困难无法得到切实的讨论。