Abstract
Abstract This article studies how Chinese internet users mobilized online to participate in actions and articulate social and political disaffection during the COVID-19 outbreak in China after the death of Dr. Li Wenliang in early 2020. Dr. Li saved many people's lives by sending early warnings in late 2019 and ultimately died of the new coronavirus on February 6, 2020. When collectively mourning Dr. Li's death, Chinese people commemorated him as a folk hero, which worked to build a “virtual utopia” through which they could go through the crisis together. This process illustrates the changing tension between state control and individual agency within particular contexts during the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020 in China.
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