Li Wenliang Research Articles

COMMEMORATING AS CRITICIZING: HOW LI WENLIANG’S WEIBO HOMEPAGE BECOMES A PLACE FOR QUESTIONING CHINA’S COVID-19 POLICIES AND A “WAILING WALL”

Li Wenliang, an eye doctor at Wuhan Central hospital and one of the first to raise alarm about the outbreak of COVID-19, was summoned by the local police and forced to sign a statement reprimanding his message as a groundless rumor as well as a disturbance to the public order in late December 2019. Two months later, Li died after contracting COVID-19 at his workplace, aged 33 years. This caused shock and outrage across China and Li’s Weibo (China’s equivalent of Twitter) homepage soon became an online “wailing wall,” where people mourned, condoled, and commemorated the whistleblower and complained, questioned, and protested the overstrict government policies relevant to COVID-19 pandemic. This study shows that Weibo offers a place for users to see the mundane life of Li Wenliang, express grief and frustration, and interact with each other to remember Li, whereas another super-powerful Chinese social media, WeChat, allows users to synthesize information about Li, provide analysis and criticism, and circulate the memory of Li through their social networks. Together, these two platforms helped stabilize Chinese internet users’ memory of Li as a whistleblower, a civilian hero, a martyr, and a supporter of free speech and diverse voices, distinguished from the official version. This study contributes to recent scholarly interest in understanding how the technological affordances of social media shape memory work. It also shows that even in a politically constrictive environment, such as China’s media ecology, the space for questioning and protesting still exists, though more nuanced and precarious.

Commemoration and Emotional Sustenance: A Text Analysis of Students' Motivations Behind Online Mourning of Dr Li Wenliang.

As one of the first doctors issued a protective warning to the public, Dr. Li Wenliang was known as "whistleblower" of COVID-19 pandemic. After his death of COVID-19, students entered to his Sina Weibo to display their condolences and sorrow. We conduct text analysis and sentiment classification to investigate the motivation behind online mourning for Dr. Li among students on Sina Weibo. Our results indicate that, a) there always more than one motivation behind online mourning exists in each time period. b) continuing connection and semi-interaction with the deceased is the main motivation when students mourn online. c) there exists positive correlation between the influence of the deceased and the motivation--sharing information with the community of fans and creating social support in a time of loss and social support. d) the motivation--honoring the dead and expressing sadness and resentment can gradually lose over time.

Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic: Strengthening our Commitment to Eye Care

Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic: Strengthening our Commitment to Eye Care

“What's going on with my China?”: Political subjectivity, scalar inquiry, and the magical power of Li Wenliang

AbstractThis article examines how the death of Li Wenliang, in February 2020, served as an affordance for Chinese netizens to engage with their intimate sense of themselves as political subjects through the interrogative process of scalar inquiry. Li, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital who was sanctioned by Chinese authorities in 2019 for warning friends about the virus, was also an eminently normative and successful Han Chinese citizen who many saw as a reflection of themselves. His persecution, public humiliation, and death thus indexed the vulnerability of even the most compliant subjects and triggered an unprecedented public response that included both grief and outrage. Although largely censored within hours, this response continued to emerge throughout the year in a public mega‐thread on his Weibo “Wailing Wall.” This article draws on an alternative archive of censored messages on Li's Weibo page—usually described as an affective, apolitical space—to demonstrate how the Wailing Wall also becomes a unique sociomoral space in which people collaboratively reflect upon their sense of themselves as embodied subjects. Scalar inquiry, I suggest, thus emerges as a continual, collaborative, and simultaneously personal and political process of interrogating citizenship and nationhood vis‐à‐vis the remembered past, the experienced present, and the anticipated future.

A wailing wall in cyberspace: Loneliness, censorship, and collective memory – in memory of Dr. Li Wenliang, the whistle blower

As the whistle blower of the outbreak of Covid-19 in Wuhan, Dr. Li Wenliang was dismissed as the spreader of rumors and punished by the authorities. His later death from the coronavirus outraged the netizens in China on various social platforms. His post on Weibo, written by Dr. Li on the day he was finally diagnosed as infected, has thus become a wailing wall in cyberspace. It has invited millions of Weibo comments below, both from those who lost their loved ones in the outbreak and netizens in general. The post functions as a monument in cyberspace for people to commemorate the bereft in the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, the first place where Covid-19 was reported. Considering the transmediality of cyberspace of our modern times, the phenomenon of online mourning urges a semiotic explanation, especially when it concerns a figure who only became famous after his death. The study aims to conceptualize the dynamics of collective memory with the monument in cyberspace following the insights of Eco’s concept of “the open text”. The wailing wall in cyberspace functions as a mnemonic text for members of society, which interacts with the collective memory restored in the social sphere. Moreover, censorship also played an important role in the formation of the wailing wall. All these features are brought together to make the wailing wall in the cyberspace a unique spectacle in online culture, which paves the way for further discussions in the future.

Three Cases of Non-compliance: Challenges of Trust and Governmental Response Strategies

Abstract This study examines three noncompliant cases occurred in Wuhan, China during the outbreak of the COVID-19 in 2020, including the Li Wenliang (李文亮) case, the Chen Qiushi (陈秋实) case, and the Huang Dengying (黄登英) case. These cases, albeit with different natures, broke out during the early stage of Wuhan ™s epidemic and posted threat and challenges to the Chinese authorities to different degrees. Based on open source information, this study focuses on the issues of trust and examines trust at three different levels (interpersonal trust, public trust, and political trust) among interactions by three groups of actors, including individuals involved in each case, the general public (e.g., how the public perceived and evaluated each case), and the authorities (e.g., how governments at the local and central levels perceived and handled each case). Two research questions are addressed: 1) How did trust at different levels play out in each case? 2) How did Chinese authorities respond to and handle threat and public trust challenges? Policy implications are drawn.

“This is China’s Wailing Wall”

AbstractDr. 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 2005;Park 2021), 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 enactscalar intimacy(Pritzker and Perrino 2020) as they grapple with shifts in their felt experience of nationhood and/or “culture.”

Dr Li Wenliang: Wuhan “Whistleblower” and Early COVID-19 Victim

Dr Li Wenliang: Wuhan “Whistleblower” and Early COVID-19 Victim

“Using unity and victory to bid farewell”: China's management of the public opinion incident of Dr Li Wenliang through crisis nationalism

This paper examines how online expressions about Dr Li Wenliang became a public opinion incident in China and how the regime adjusted its internet censorship and emotional governance. We find that public perception of Li changed from a rumormonger to a whistleblower, a victim of structural causes, and a martyr of the nation, with collective emotions shifting from feelings of uncertainty to outrage, panic, and grief. Reassured by the state's crisis management and by positive stories of solidarity and resilience, the public then moved to a xenophobic discourse of crisis nationalism with feelings of hope, vindication, and pride. Meanwhile, public trust in the state grew as the regime delegated responsibility to local governments and perpetuated itself as a paternalistic, responsive, and effective leader through an authoritarian participatory propaganda. We argue that the pandemic spawned an emerging crisis nationalism that fed into the regime's crisis management and propaganda.

Games and Playfulness

As China undergoes its digital revolution with the rapid developments of new media and technology on a massive scale, the bodies which used to be the sites for acclaiming for socio-political demands are now shifted to the digital sphere. However, social activists have discovered alternative ways to raise their voices through the virtual and cyber space. They have interwoven a hybrid body of solidarity in games and digital platforms. This article takes the 2020 Hong Kong resistance in Nintendo game Animal Crossing and the legacy of Covid-19 ‘Whistle blower’ Li Wenliang on Chinese social media as cases, aiming to develop a comprehensive and comparative analysis on the performativity and solidarity that emerge with gamification and playfulness in contemporary Sino-sphere.

Social Media User Behavior and Emotions during Crisis Events.

The wide availability of smart mobile devices and Web 2.0 services has allowed people to easily access news, spread information, and express their opinions and emotions using various social media platforms. However, because of the ease of joining these sites, people also use them to spread rumors and vent their emotions, with the social platforms often playing a facilitation role. This paper collected more than 190,000 messages published on the Chinese Sina-Weibo platform to examine social media user behaviors and emotions during an emergency, with a particular research focus on the “Dr. Li Wenliang” reports associated with the COVID-19 epidemic in China. The verified accounts were found to have the strongest interactions with users, and the sentiment analysis revealed that the news from government agencies had a positive user effect and the national media and trusted experts were more favored by users in an emergency. This research provides a new perspective on trust and the use of social media platforms in crises, and therefore offers some guidance to government agencies.

How Politics ‘Messed up with’ Institutionalization: A Case Study of the Investigation into the Death of Li Wenliang during the Initial Months of COVID-19

ABSTRACT This research offers a timely examination of the functioning of China’s National Supervisory Commission (NSC) in Dr. Li Wenliang’s case. Based on the normative analysis and empirical study, this research identifies two flaws of the NSC preset by particular features of a Leninist state, which make it vulnerable to politicization in the initiation and the course of this investigation: (i) Overreliance on certain factional power distribution; (ii) Twofold identity as an anti-corruption agency and a party disciplinarian concurrently. By challenging both the institutionalization and deinstitutionalization arguments with a critical case, this research advances new theoretical knowledge on the self-defeating mechanisms compromising institutionalization in the Leninist regime and highlights the significance of differentiating subtypes of authoritarianism in the comparative study of institutionalization.

The ophthalmic implications of COVID-19: What we know so far

The current COVID-19 pandemic was caused by a new strain of coronavirus that arose in Wuhan (Hubei, China). Dr. Li Wenliang, a 33-year-old ophthalmologist from the Central Hospital of Wuhan, who has unfortunately died from the infection was one of the first to notify about the new form of viral pneumonia. He was infected by SARS-Cov-2 from an asymptomatic glaucoma patient during the ophthalmic examination. This experience clearly indicates that ophthalmologists are at risk of COVID-19 infection. Several forms of eye disease such as hyperemia, chemosis, conjunctivitis, uveitis, optic neuropathy and increased secretion can occur in patients with COVID-19, and the clinical course of the ocular disease may be quite variable [1].

Pitfalls of Social Media in the Era of COVID-19 Pandemics.

In December 2019, Wuhan, China, reported an outbreak of nSARS-CoV2 that caused viral pneumonia, COVID-19. Li Wenliang, a Chinese ophthalmologist, first communicated on Chinese social media about the existence and spread of the unknown viral pneumonia in Wuhan, China. By the end of March 2020, the virus had spread worldwide. However, non-scientific information related to the viral outbreak, disease, and mortality spread even faster on social media. This study performed literature searches among different databases, i.e., PubMed, PubMed Central, and Web of Science, to understand the pitfall of social media during the COVID-19 pandemic and the impact of non-scientific information on public health. Social media not only shared information regarding the outbreak of nSARS-CoV2 and COVID-19 disease but also misinformation regarding epidemiology, government policies, prevention, cure, and vaccination. Thus, strict regulation is required to control the spread of misleading information.

Graves in One's Heart: Grassroots Memorialization of Dr. Li Wenliang during the COVID-19 Outbreak in China

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.

Digital activism and collective mourning by Chinese netizens during COVID-19.

This study examines the discursive practice of mourning and commenting by netizens on the final social media post made by Dr Li Wenliang, regarding it as a form of political participation and competitive discursive politics enacted in cyberspace. Discourse theory is applied to conduct discourse analysis on 4000 comments. We identified two strategies that netizens used to establish an alternative space for discourse. The first involved hidden protests expressed through multi-semantic mourning, avoiding suppression by indirectly challenging official authorities. Second, through engagement with microblogs, netizens applied personalized narratives to form a collective memory and a counter-memory space that departed from the official normative narrative. Discursive activities enacted by netizens stimulated the political agenda of resilient adjustment on the part of the authorities, leading the government to accept and incorporate public demands into policies through strategic rectification. These findings help to better understand the significant power of disorganized connective action that is reliant on affective citizens and the further development of regime resilience on the part of the Chinese political system in response to digital activities.

Making memory work: The SARS memory and China’s war on COVID-19

In the global fight against COVID-19, a “pandemic memory thesis” emerges. This thesis argues that nations with memories of past pandemics, such as East Asian countries with SARS memories, can better control the COVID-19 pandemic today. Yet, if this thesis holds, why hadn’t the SARS memory helped China prevent the outbreak of COVID-19? Why, however, can China swiftly contain the pandemic in its later stages by exploiting the SARS memory? To address this contradiction, I treat the pandemic as an ontological crisis and put forward a theory centering on the construction of ontological consensus by the state and society. By studying symbolic events in China’s war on COVID-19, particularly the Li Wenliang and Zhong Nanshan cases, I argue that the state’s acknowledgment of the crisis, society’s awareness and cultural preparedness, and the re-fusion of state-society relations are crucial for memory to work in the fight against a new pandemic.

Pandemic, censorship and creative protests via grassroots visual mobilization

In early 2020, Chinese people engaged in several rounds of extraordinary online campaigns in response to the government’s handling of the outbreak of coronavirus. During these campaigns, visual images played a crucial role in facilitating netizens to inform each other, escape official censoring machinery, express anger and frustration, excavate truth, document reality and mobilize online support and protest. In particular, images related with Dr Li Wenliang, one of whistle-blowers of the soon-to-be pandemic who himself died of the virus, and Dr Ai Fen, the first doctor to share information about a possible coronavirus diagnose among her colleagues, became the focal points of the unprecedented online mobilization successively. Millions of netizens participated in the effort to circulate these images (and stories behind them) and invented ingenious ways to continue the endeavour when confronted by the heightened censorship. Various art communities and individuals have done their share to fuel in this momentum of visual mobilization and there was a surge of call for public participation in responding to the pandemic through participatory public artworks. Maskbook, initiated by artist Wen Fang, and One More Day led by MeDoc, are two exemplary cases. Through analysing these images, this article discusses China’s grassroots visual mobilization to claim for freedom of speech and access to truth in the wake of the massive health crisis and articulates its contribution to the formation of a bottom-up visual discourse that challenges the state’s media discourse in interpreting the pandemic as a victory of government leadership.

Analysis of the Thematic Progression Patterns in English News Discourse

The theory of theme and rheme and the patterns of thematic progression are not only two important parts of the systemic functional grammar but also an important means of discourse analysis. With thematic structure theory and patterns of thematic progression as the theoretical support, this research makes a combination of theoretical research and discourse analysis. This paper aims to find out the application and characteristics of the theme and rheme structure in English news discourse. After choosing the data from BBC (website:https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51403795) reporting on 7th February 2020 with the title of Li Wenliang: Coronavirus Kills Chinese Whistleblower Doctor and giving a detailed analysis by empirical study. Through the analysis of the relationship between theme and rheme in the full text, we find that this text does not only apply a certain thematic progression pattern, but also applies more than one thematic progression pattern. Therefore, we come to the conclusion that thematic progression does exist in this news discourse and shows obvious characteristics and distribution. And also, parallel pattern and continuation pattern are frequently presented in this news discourse.

Remembering the footsteps of five distinguished ophthalmologists from the present in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic

We have reported that 40 specific intractable diseases and 24 types of cancer and malignancies as well as Kawasaki disease may be triggered by pollen in our previous papers. Further, we reported in 2021 two articles regarding relation of outbreak of Influenza and COVID-19, and pollen exposure. In this paper, five distinguished ophthalmologists will be considered and described. Mikito Takayasu was the first person to report the discovery of Takayasu’s arteritis, one of the vasculitis syndromes, which may be a pollen-induced disease as well as Kawasaki disease. Next, Einosuke Harada, Alfred Vogt and Yoshizo Koyanagi are considered and described as the reporters of Vogt-Koyanagi-Harada disease. The fifth ophthalmologist is Li Wenliang who was the first person in the world to report the outbreak of SARS-COV-2 infection. Many people are still unaware of the fact that exposure to pollen can lead to many diseases. The author hopes that those who are involved in medical care will consider the scientific facts, keep their eyes open, and use this knowledge in their daily activities, although clear proof in experimental medicine is craved.