SARS, a shipwreck, a NATO attack, and September 11, 2001: Global information flows and Chinese responses to tragic news events

Abstract

In this article, I examine how Chinese citizens in China and abroad used discourses of Chinese backwardness to make sense of tragic news events while simultaneously trying to avoid becoming identified with that backwardness. I focus on various interpretations of NATO's bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999; the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks; the sinking of a Chinese ferry in 1999; and the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic to explore how Chinese citizens negotiated between their own ambivalent loyalties and the contradictory official, unofficial, local, national, and international narratives in which these events were embedded. These negotiations suggest that global information flows are creating a transnational panopticon that increasingly enables neoliberal governmentality to operate on transnational levels.