Countering COVID-19-Related Anti-Chinese Racism with Translanguaged Swearing on Social Media

• Published in: Multilingua Vol. 39; no. 5; pp. 607 - 616
• Main Author: Zhu, Hongqiang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: De Gruyter Mouton 01.09.2020
• Subjects: Chinese; COVID-19; English; Language Dominance; Language Usage; Prevention; Racial Bias; Resistance (Psychology); Social Media; Sociolinguistics; Translation
• DOI: 10.1515/multi-2020-0093
• ISSN: 0167-8507

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has generated a spectacular rise in social media communication and an unprecedented avalanche of global conversation. This paper traces the emergence of the racist term "Chinese virus" used by the President of the United States, Donald Trump, on the Western social media platform Twitter and its reception and recontextualization on Chinese social media. Creative bilingual responses fusing English and Chinese resulted in a popular searchable meme "#[foreign characters omitted]#" ("#Chinglish used for cross-cultural communication#"), on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform. Such linguistic creativity involves a variation of swears to mock and condemn the racist phrase. Formally, linguistic practices such as self-coinage, transliteration, verbal repetition, and acronyms can be observed. Functionally, the recontexualizations evidence a defensive ideology linked to nationalism and modernism. Ultimately, combatting the English racist term "Chinese virus" with a creative mixture of English and Chinese demonstrates how English has become ever more decentered during the COVID-19 pandemic.