Despicable 'other' and innocent 'us': emotion politics in the time of the pandemic

The paper examines how emotions are mobilized in Chinese official propaganda to sustain regime legitimacy, noting a broader shift from negative emotions (e.g., humiliation, shame) to more positive ones (e.g., pride, gratitude) in recent years. The Covid-19 pandemic provided an opportunity for the CCP to redirect public fear and dissatisfaction toward regime-supportive nationalism, especially amid Sino–US tensions. Addressing the gap on how emotional management mechanisms are integrated with nationalistic discourse on social media, the study focuses on Huanqiu Shibao’s (HQSB) WeChat coverage, explicitly framing the United States as the primary ‘other’. The research question is: How does HQSB enact emotional management through nationalistic discourse?

Prior work shows the CCP’s long-standing ‘emotion work’ in nation-building, from humiliation narratives and the 1990s patriotic education to compassion politics after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Under Xi, ‘positive energy’ and ‘wolf warrior’ pride reflect a recalibrated affective governance aligning public emotions with party-state ideology, framed as affective biopolitics. During Covid-19, initial fear and anger were managed through disaster nationalism, martyrdom of Dr. Li Wenliang, and heroization of ordinary citizens to foster solidarity and compliance. As China controlled domestic contagion, propaganda shifted to externally focused, exclusionary pride, contrasting China’s success with Western failures, fostering enemification of the US, and promoting vaccine nationalism blended with globalism. While prior studies emphasize formal news outlets, social media expressions (e.g., WeChat) remain underexplored; this study addresses that gap via HQSB.

Case: HQSB’s official WeChat account, chosen for its official affiliation (People’s Daily), nationalistic positioning, and reach. Timeframe: January 1, 2020 to February 16, 2021. Sampling: Retrieved 227 WeChat articles with at least one mention of a foreign country using the keyword 新冠 (Covid); screened out 69 news bulletins lacking emotional content to focus on commentary and emotionally expressive posts; final corpus: 158 articles. Coding and analysis: Texts were coded for seven emotions based on Ekman’s taxonomy (happiness/joy, surprise, fear, sadness, anger, disgust) plus ‘praise’ from Luo et al.’s Sinicized scheme. Two authors double-coded 40 articles (intercoder reliability 85%); the remainder were coded by the second author, identifying 325 emotion occurrences. Frequencies and temporal distributions were compiled. Discourse analysis of coded extracts then identified HQSB’s emotion mobilization strategies and associated nationalistic narratives, with representative excerpts translated into English.

• Emotional distribution: HQSB’s tone skews negative. Disgust appears in 47% of posts (107 occurrences). Other emotions: surprise (25% of articles; 42 occurrences), praise (25%; 47), sadness (25%; 40), anger (24%; 43), fear (20%; 40), and joy (4%; 6). Posts on Covid-19 peaked in April 2020 and resurged in December 2020, aligning with US Covid-19 death trends. Fear peaked in February 2020, resurfacing in April–May amid politicization in the US.
• Two nationalistic strategies: (1) Defensive nationalism legitimizes strict containment by transforming fear into solidarity via war metaphors, trust in ‘science’ and centralized control, and by mobilizing joy/praise to build pride—often validated by ‘external applause’ (e.g., Serbia’s reception of Chinese vaccines) and contrasts with EU delays. (2) Aggressive nationalism counters external criticism by othering the US: disgust is mobilized via an ‘inoculation’ tactic (selectively presenting and rebutting Western criticisms); anger is displayed as emanating from American citizens toward their elites; surprise is used to demystify the American Dream (citing US media critiques) and to highlight positive surprise about China’s transparency (WHO scientists); sadness/disappointment is used to portray declining US leadership (e.g., Canada’s reaction to US mask export suspension).
• Overall, HQSB constructs a binary of a despicable ‘them’ (primarily the US) versus an innocent ‘us’ (China and its citizens), converting international news into domestically resonant propaganda that supports nation-building and asserts systemic superiority.

Findings address the research question by showing that HQSB’s WeChat coverage integrates emotion management with nationalist narratives to bolster CCP legitimacy during Covid-19. Defensive nationalism channels fear into collective trust and compliance with stringent measures, while joy and praise—amplified by foreign validation—reinforce national pride and system confidence. Aggressive nationalism reframes external critiques as geopolitically motivated hostility, mobilizing disgust, anger, surprise, and disappointment to delegitimize the US model and leadership. These affective tactics align with Sino–US rivalry and demonstrate how international discourse is curated to serve domestic nation-building and authoritarian resilience, leveraging social media’s sensationalist affordances.

The study identifies and maps two core strategies—defensive and aggressive nationalism—underpinning HQSB’s emotional management during the pandemic, evidencing a predominantly negative emotional profile with targeted use of positive affect for pride and solidarity. It shows how Chinese propaganda on social media converts international (especially US-focused) news into domestic content that legitimizes governance and promotes systemic superiority. The work contributes to literature on affective governance and digital propaganda by detailing mechanisms of emotion-setting alongside agenda-setting. Future research is suggested on the downstream effects of emotional mobilization during Covid-19 and subsequent public health crises, particularly within social media ecosystems.