“Warring Against the Truth: Wuhan, COVID-19 and Media Suppression”
January 29, 2022, 9:00AM-12:00PM
Elizabeth Shim
Bio: Elizabeth Shim is a former journalist at United Press International, where she served as Chief Asia Writer for seven years, covering breaking news stories, including the U.S.-North Korea summits and the first known outbreak of the novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China.
Elizabeth currently is a principal at Haven Tower Group, a strategic communications firm, where she specializes in content creation and the development of media materials. She is working on her first book, North Korea’s Nuclear Cinema: Simulation and Neoliberal Politics in the Two Koreas, with I.B. Tauris in London, an imprint of Bloomsbury. She has also reported for the Associated Press in Seoul and has contributed columns to the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong.
Prior to working on her book, Elizabeth contributed a chapter published in Media Technologies for Work and Play in East Asia: Critical Perspectives on Japan and the Two Koreas, available from Bristol University Press, where she analyzed the geopolitical relations between North and South Korea through the lens of digital life. As a researcher and writer, Elizabeth is interested in postmodern theories of media as they apply to contemporary Asian politics and society. She is also interested in exploring the sociology of finance and works with fintech clients in her current work as a strategic communications consultant in New York.
Elizabeth earned a Bachelor of Arts in economics and philosophy from Wellesley College and a Master’s degree in global journalism and East Asian studies from New York University, where she was a departmental fellow. She is also a 2016-17 Center for Strategic and International Studies U.S.-Korea NextGen Scholar and was a 2019 Korean Collections Consortium of North America travel grant recipient.
Summary: Chinese state media and censorship during the initial COVID outbreak and its aftermath is a case study of media suppression in China. I covered China’s initial response to the outbreak in Wuhan in early 2020. The talk will trace the Chinese government’s relationship with the news media to its post-Tiananmen origins and address Xi Jinping’s rise to power in a global context. While China’s authoritarianism poses challenges, the country’s hard nationalist turn also comes at a time when the West has culturally leaned into a multi-pronged assault on democratic values. The third part of my talk would focus on how white supremacy, politicized mass affect and indifference to truth in the West and the situation in China collided, yielding toxic results, including but not limited to the surge in anti-Asian hate crimes during the pandemic.
Session Pre-reading Materials:
1. Lack of government transparency about a fast-spreading virus, state controls on media and attacks on whistleblowers and citizen journalists were reported in the central Chinese city of Wuhan before it was brought to its knees in late January 2020. Read this Reporters Without Borders report/timeline of how the suppression of press freedoms culminated in the first COVID-19 lockdown. LINK: “If the Chinese press were free, the coronavirus might not be a pandemic,” argues RSF | RSF
2. Conspiracy theories spread across social media in both China and the United States. In the absence of a functioning press, Chinese state actors, including members of Beijing’s foreign ministry, increased their online activities to defend China’s COVID-19 policy. Reading this 9-month investigation from the Associated Press detailing the “disinformation outbreak” during the pandemic. LINK: Anatomy of a conspiracy: With COVID, China took leading role | AP News
3. Former President Donald Trump referred to the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” and also referred to the disease as the “Kung-Flu.” These racially tinged labels for a deadly pandemic unleashed an unprecedented wave of anti-Asian violence in the West and reflected the declining ties between the United States and China during the Trump years. LINK: Donald Trump’s ‘Chinese virus’: the politics of naming
Additional Information:
Additional Resources about Media Suppression Globally and in East Asia
Digital Harassment Across Asias (Webinar Feb. 16, 2022, 3-5pm)