Staying United While Separated: Rethinking the Connectivity and Interaction on Chinese Social Media During the Pandemic of COVID-19

Abstract

This thesis investigates how Weibo and WeChat shaped connection, cooperation, emotional expression, and civic engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 within a politically conservative regime. It reveals a central paradox in China’s digital pandemic response: online networks fostered solidarity and connective action while also enforcing compliance, silencing dissent, and reinforcing social and political divisions.

Centred on the slogan “Stay cohesive, we can defeat the pandemic” (Zhong Zhi Cheng Cheng, Kang Ji Yi Qing), the thesis reconceptualises We Media through the lenses of prosumers, soft leaders, and influencers. It examines how citizens used intimate networks and social capital to share resources, coordinate local responses, and sustain morale during the crisis. The study combines theories of networked and affective publics, convergence culture, and networked intimacy with Foucauldian power, Bourdieu’s habitus, and Confucian concepts to analyse the relationship between agency, culture, and political discourse in China’s digital sphere.

Using Dahlgren and Hill’s five parameters of media engagement as its framework, the study employs autoethnography, digital ethnography, and 16 semi-structured interviews with 18 participants.

The findings show that collaboration was shaped not only by platform affordances but also by censorship, nationalism, relational ethics, and peer surveillance. Weibo functioned as a volatile digital public sphere, enabling information exchange and emotional solidarity while amplifying polarisation and suppressing minority voices. WeChat operated as a semi-public space shaped by networked intimacy and Confucian relational norms, where users coordinated cooperation, circulated affective content, enforced moral expectations, and engaged in subtle resistance. Across both platforms, users performed relational and affective labour as We Media, shaping understandings of the pandemic at personal and collective levels.