“Platform Amphibiousness” in Covid-19: The Construction and Communication of National Image in the Global South in the Polymedia Use of Chinese Overseas Students

1.1 Polymedia Use in Globalized Interactions

Media use reflects individuals’ daily use and contact with media, including media use types, media contact time and frequency, media use preferences, etc (Wilczek, 2018). As for the group of international students, a clear feature of polymedia use is more evident in their media use. The concept of “polymedia” was born in the social background of the global migration wave and the flow of human capital. It aims to discuss that users can overcome the defects of any other media by choosing one media in order to realize their communication intention and achieve control in their interpersonal relationships (Madianou & Miller, 2011). Before arriving in China, they were familiar with globally localized social media represented by Facebook and WhatsApp, but after arriving in China they needed to adapt to Chinese local social media represented by WeChat. This kind of dual use of media makes international students a representative group of “media amphibians” in the globalized media era. We introduce here the concept of “media amphibian”, which indicates an individual or a group living in the state of using two different media platform systems, adapting to diverse media narrative logics. And the term “platform amphibiousness” is also derived to describe their media practicing state. These terms might better clarify the characterization of the people who have polymedia use and should be distinguished from those people who have multi-media use for their use is based on different media forms such as using both podcast and Internet for news at the same time.

Previous research on polymedia often focused on analyzing the use strategies from an individual’s feelings in use, such as the concept of platform swing proposed by Tandoc et al. (2019), or examining the media content characteristics and use effects of different platforms by comparison (Chib et al., 2014). The environment of the global media is what the platform amphibians are living in, and they are strategically switching between media platforms in this technological environment. These overseas students are the most direct experiencers of different media platforms in China and internationally, and they are also the overall responders of the international platform “nature”.

However, few studies have talked about implications from this microscopic individual use to the more macroscopic international communication, other than the communication implications of interactions in the Global South. Clearly, standing in the intersection of global communication, international students’ polymedia use reflects their adaptation and integration into a new culture and can also reflect a microcosm of country-to-country interactions.

The emergence of Covid-19 exacerbates such a sociocultural psychological integration. Public health emergencies are often accompanied by large-scale illness, disability, or death in a short period of time. Faced with emergencies and great uncertainty, people need to obtain all kinds of information, reduce their information vulnerability, reduce their risk perception, and form subjective cognition and behavioral decisions about diseases (Li & Liu, 2020). In the post-epidemic context, international students in China are experiencing dramatic mediated social change, and for the international students from countries in the Global South selected for this paper, the development and rise of the Global South in terms of media technology and social governance is more intuitively felt. Therefore, in the context of epidemic-accelerated social change, the following question is posed for the group of international students.

1.2 National Image Construction in the Post-epidemic Era

In the post-epidemic era, which is full of risks and uncertainties, the construction of national image is a particularly complicated process. The epidemic has added challenges to the communication of national image, but at the same time, there are also rich opportunities. It can be said that the epidemic is not only a test of the comprehensive strength of each country, but also an indicator of the level of information literacy and the ability to resist the “information epidemic” of each country’s government and people. In recent years, relevant studies in international academic communities have shown that China has evolved into a key variable to solve a series of global “wicked problems” such as pandemic, climate change, and the gap between the rich and the poor. Therefore, academic communities advocate that China should be understood from political, economic, social and other dimensions (Rudolph, 2018). Although the epidemic is still raging, the fundamental context of globalization in today’s world has not changed. In the post-epidemic era, when the “West is absent” and the world is accelerating into a “post-Western” and “post-American” ideological crisis, China’s own actions are related to the construction of its position in the international landscape and discourse order, and also affect the trust of the Global South in China and the voice of the Global South in the global discourse system. As actual cross-cultural practitioners, the personal experiences of international students in China during the epidemic will have a direct impact on their perceptions of China’s national image.

In addition, the interactive perception of social media has become an important driving force in the transformation of the overall image of the China and society as outlined by the subjects of actors coming to China in the post-epidemic era. International students can directly sense a “nearby” Chinese society in their own life circle based on their arrival at the scene, but the larger “distant” China is still decoded and constructed more indirectly through social insights and media windows. In recent years, content about China is increasing year by year on international media platforms during social media evolution, and the production of relevant content by local Chinese “netizens” and foreign bloggers in China has created a more three-dimensional and comprehensive “online” picture of China than before. This has also enabled more international audiences to gain a deeper understanding of China. As media amphibians, foreign students in China are practicing embedding local Chinese social media alongside their original Western media. Through the epidemic, the local social media has also been instrumental in constructing and “connoting” the national image of China in the minds of international students.

Focusing on the international students from the Global South who experienced the collision of international communication during the epidemic, it can be said that their perceptions of China’s national image were confronted with a very complex source of information, but how their national images of China were constructed and changed in this process, reflecting the important influence of local globalization, the following questions are asked.

1.3 Micro Forces of International Communication in the Perspective of the Global South

The extensive cross-platform media practices of international students not only enrich their personal lives and experience the culture of other countries, but also act as a key node in the overall international communication. In the network of Global South interactions, studies often base the actors on countries and governments, but tend to overlook the important role of individuals in this communication process. As the actor network described by Latour (2005), in addition to seeing the role of macro-subjects, overseas students can play the role of structure holes among them (Burt, 2004).

In the era of new media, the global media information dissemination order is undergoing rapid transformation, which is highlighted by the rise of the mechanism of close information flow within major cultural groups, which indicates that the media transformation and the process of multi-polarization in the world are developing. The interactions of developing countries have gradually flourished, and the active mechanism of regional cultural circles has a diminishing effect on Western media hegemony (Friedman, 1994). In the post-epidemic era, they are microscopically responsible for bridging the dialog among countries from Global South, communicating heterogenous cultures and promoting consensus in the ideological game of great powers. In a sense, international students who are intercultural are an important force for South countries to oppose global media hegemony in the coming post-Western era. Specifically, international students are also engaged in a discursive effort of cross-platform export in the use of polymedia to break down the stereotypes of China that have been orientalized under Western narratives.

Following on the hypothesis from above, international students are bound to communicate in this polymedia use after they have undergone their personal media use transformation and national image construction. In the absence of a true resonance of South–South communication, the characteristics and effects of such cross-cultural communication are of interest to this study, and the following question is asked.

3.1 From Straying to Breaking the Wall: The Epidemic Accelerated their Paradigm Shift in the Use of Polymedia

Firstly, in terms of the media platforms used, the international students who are amphibious on the platforms has a certain degree of mapping relationship. The study found that almost all interviewees mentioned that they use two social media at the same time, except for S13 who said that he only uses WeChat now and does not actively use Western media such as Facebook anymore. In this overlapping use of platforms, international students’ use of both Chinese and Western social media shows a correspondence relationship due to their need for communication, information, and path dependence on their original media use (see Table 2). In such a relationship, the inertia of using the original media may be the original motivation for them to find the corresponding local platform for media adaptation after they come to China. We can find that at this initial stage, international students’ use of local social media is still under the pull of their original platform usage patterns and in a relatively passive state.

Secondly, getting information becomes the main purpose of international students in using the existing platforms. In our study, we found that international students have a greater demand for information about Chinese society, culture, and economy, and it is obvious that the information about China in the existing media is not enough to satisfy them for reasons of information’s quality and quantity, so that there is an “information deficit” in the use of Western media. In order to reduce the cognitive inconvenience caused by this information imbalance, they also tried to cross over to Chinese media in order to fill this information gap. As S12 said:

Sometimes when I want to know something about China and if there was nothing I could get from Google or YouTube, I will go to Baidu or Bilibili to read some reports in Chinese or watch some documentaries.

In addition, among the local mass media such as Bilibili, international students are also more motivated to find knowledge-based information such as historical documentaries and reports on China’s economy that can construct China’s image on these platforms.

Thirdly, in terms of usage, the interviews revealed no significant changes in the usage habits of Western and local Chinese media before and after the new epidemic, but there was a quiet shift in the perceptions of each medium. The interviewees did change their media use to varying degrees, but these changes only involved a relative increase in overall time use and a longitudinal extension, and did not involve large fluctuations in the depth of media use at the synchronicity level, which is also a response to the previous research question 1. Nevertheless, we found in the interviews that international students spent more time living in China because of the pandemic and other reasons, and the relative inconvenience of international travel made their travel choices more inclined to play and experience within the Chinese territory. Physical constraints also make them more active in using local media after the epidemic to empower their local life. For example:

When I want to go out to some local spots in Wuhan or travel to other places throughout China, I would first go for Xiaohongshu to do some online research. For example, where and how others who have been there visited would give me some ideas. (S3)

As we can see, the epidemic still accelerates the process of breaking the wall of the media, which was going on slowly, and although the process is still relatively less significant and rapid, we cannot ignore the positive energy contained in the quantitative change.

3.2 From Information to Action: Practical Actions and Factual Information Become Powerful Factors in Image Construction

Before they came to China, indirect information was the main factor in constructing international students’ impressions of China. In the interviews, 10 international students explicitly stated that they had learned about China through media reports or friends and relatives who had visited China. Interestingly, in the subsequent questions about the change of impressions of China after coming to China, those international students who learned about China mainly through media reports almost all directly or indirectly talked about many changes from negative to positive impressions, while those who learned about China mainly through family and friends said that they did not have much “preconception” of China, so they did not have the former so-called image reconstruction after coming to China. Erving Goffman’s definition of “frame” is “people’s definition of situation, which is based on a series of organizational principles. These organizational principles dominate events, and our subjective knowledge permeates them. These basic elements become frames” (Goffman, 1974). The transformation of China’s image through the direct and indirect experiences of international students reveals some traces of pre-existing frames of international media coverage of China, and some of these frames potentially contribute to the perception of China’s national image despite the absence of relevant experiences of international students.

After arriving in China, practical action became a major force in dissolving the established frames and touching the real China. The real experiences on the ground in discovering about the Chinese epidemic were more intuitive and vivid for international students to perceive Chinese society, Chinese development, and Chinese culture. As S15 said, “I never thought that China will have so many incredible buildings here”. S8 even mentioned in the interview that he had focused his first drone video on his university library and wrote under his WeChat’s Moments: “今天起我可以给尼加拉瓜人看武汉, 和中国这个漂亮的国家!” (From now on, I can show Nicaraguans Wuhan and this beautiful country, China!)

However, things have changed greatly during the pandemic. We could find a lot of stigmatizations towards China in news reports of the Western social media. The stigma is “a characteristic that is inconsistent with social expectations and whose possessor often experiences a loss of identity, credibility, or value in social interactions, and produces feelings of shame, stigma, and guilt (Goffman, 1986).” To be more specific in international communication, it usually manifests itself as the purposeful and conscious imposition of derogatory and insulting allegations on the identity, characteristics or behavior of the stigmatized country by the country stigmatizing others, and the successful realization of discrimination or derogation against the stigmatized object. And there are some kinds of tendency that “framing” and “stigma” integrating with each other in the process of communication. For example, according to the identical measures of lockdown against the pandemic, the New York Times (2020) accused China of “greatly damaging people’s lives and freedoms”, in their reports but praised Italy for “risking its own economy to stop the spread of Europe’s worst epidemic”, a double standard here is obvious. More explanations to the stigmatization and its framing could be found in the reports of the Wall Street Journal (2020) and the Jyllands-Posten (BBC, 2020), where the latter published a cartoon that featured the five-star red flag as an outline, but replaced the five stars on the red flag with the symbols of five viruses and the former, published a discriminatory article China is the real sick man of Asia.

After experiencing the epidemic, the international students who experienced in China directly and received correct factual information about the epidemic also unlocked more aspects of China. In our interviews, we found that the entire international student community almost invariably sought to verify the reports of the epidemic in their use of polymedia. When presented with inaccurate information about China that they could not confirm, almost all international students chose to look for discrepancies in heterogenous sources. During the epidemic, the influx of inaccurate information on social media caused an “information epidemic”. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), information epidemic is a phenomenon in which a large amount of information, including rumors and gossip, spreads rapidly through cell phones, social media, the Internet, and other communication technologies in the context of an infectious disease epidemic, making it difficult to find trustworthy sources of information and guidance to rely on, and hindering effective measures to prevent and control the epidemic (WHO, 2018). As far as international students are concerned, this round of “belief and epidemic” will affect international students’ risk perception and national recognition of China. In order to counteract the negative effects of the “epidemic”, international students have taken the initiative to find out the truth by combining their local experiences and seeking multiple verifications of the epidemic reports. In this process, the emergence of the “epidemic” has accelerated the improvement of international students’ media literacy and their access to real sources of reports in the comparison, which has accelerated the process of breaking the wall of national image construction. Specifically comparing the news about the epidemic from China and abroad, some international students mentioned that:

The news reported from abroad is very negative and depressing, which is quite uncomfortable, and relatively speaking, the news about pandemic from China is more constructive, because it mainly tells people not to be panic and will also give people measures could be taken to protect themselves (S5).

Based on this, they generally preferred to receive news from China during the epidemic, and the credibility of international news about China was undermined because it conflicted with what international students saw from local. In the case of reports about the epidemic in China, international students chose to trust their direct local experiences after comparing inside and outside. As S3 mentioned: “it was pretty uncomfortable to hear what Facebook and Twitter said what was going on in China. It’s negative and not productive, so I just tried to ignore them.” And S8 said “it seemed that the press manipulated the reports and some of it were obviously lies. There were not people dying in the streets.”

The study found that the common frameworks that international students perceived in the Western media coverage of the epidemic were fabricated, for instance, the origin of the virus framework (China created the virus), the catastrophizing framework (corpses and infected people are everywhere in streets of China), the repressive control framework (the government is pushing epidemic prevention measures in an anti-human rights way), and the racist framework (China treats Chinese people and foreigners differently in China); in the interview, S5 mentioned:

After the outbreak of epidemic in Wuhan, a foreign media approached me and wanted to have an interview. When I was trying to tell them the truth that everything was positive outside, they always tried to interrupt me and asked me to say something bad, which was quite annoying.

With the deepening of local media and related media interventions, international students were able to perceive the information corresponding to the reality, which is different from the Western media reports, which not only deconstructed the negative frame of foreign media reports, but also constructed a more realistic and objective image of China. After being exposed to Chinese mainstream media reports and combined with local practice, they have positive feedback on the narrative of China’s fight against the epidemic and partly contribute to the perception of the overall national image. As S12 mentioned:

I think the Chinese government’s regulations toward Covid-19 are quite effective instead of someone called ‘anti-human rights’, on the contrary, it is protecting peoples. That’s why China is the safest country now.

It is important to note that while international news frameworks have been rapidly dismantled in the development of international students’ practices and perceptions from local, they still influence international students indirectly in several ways. For example, S12 mentioned:

My family would often contact me and tell me to take care of myself, and I would always go out of my way to explain to them that China has already got back to normal now. This always makes me feel quite helpless.

How do international students, who are relatively well-informed about China, respond to such information asymmetry?

3.3 From Node to Window: Individual and Group Power in Global South Communication

Before the epidemic, international students mostly played the role of dissemination nodes in a scattered manner. During this period, international students shared their local lives across platforms in the use of polymedia. This sharing was mainly rooted in campus and city life, and the mode of sharing varied depending on individual media usage preferences.

The outbreak of the epidemic and the experience of fighting the epidemic in China became a source of group consensus for international students, and pulled them to make more external corrections. Before the epidemic, the world’s attention on China was more focused on China’s economic development and political evolution, while the outbreak of the epidemic made the world focus on the agenda of the Chinese epidemic as well. By setting up a series of related agendas, the Western media has been able to create a one-way gaze on China and lead its people to shift the focus from the country’s epidemic and accept various frameworks for reporting on China. It is important to emphasize that while this behavior has brought about various disadvantages to China’s national image, foreign audiences have not been subjected to a single dominant-hegemonic decoding entirely at the will of the media. As mentioned earlier, when users clearly perceive that Western reports are inaccurate and engage in negotiated or oppositional decoding, they actively seek out heterogenous sources to find out the truth, which indirectly raises foreign audiences’ concerns about China, and is a potential opportunity to motivate them to seriously understand China. For example, the interviews found that the friends and relatives of international students in their home countries tended to learn more and more frequently about China from them, and the international students would give them discourse feedback based on their actual experiences, and the sides involved in this set of discourse also had a tendency to spill over from reporting the Chinese epidemic to narrating the real experiences of Chinese society and Chinese culture, which gradually spread the real image of the Chinese nation to their entire social network under the nodal communication. For example, S4 mentioned:

When the pandemic was raging in Wuhan, my family was very concerned about my safety here, but I told them not to worry about me and everything went well during the lockdown. We had school delivering food and water to us and then all lives go back to normal now…I also told my family that Chinese food is great and there are many interesting spots and buildings, and I tried to persuade my sister to apply for a Chinese university.

It is because of the common experience of the whole group of international students in fighting against the epidemic in China that they have reached a consensus in the social media field, and the combined power of individual discourse has become a powerful force to dispel inaccurate information on social media.

We might notice that the two kinds of platform possess two kinds of different frames, and very interestingly, those frames might occur to compete with each other for wanting to be the leading force to affect audiences’ opinion. As Aarøe (2017) points out for us, framing effects in dynamic competitive information flows depend on timing and the processing mode in the audience, and social media. And considering the effect of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and political blogs, the framing effect might function not as the same as before because these social media constitute new communication platforms through which politicians and other elite actors can disseminate their preferred frames to the public without the traditional news media as a mediator (Otterbacher et al., 2013). The oversea students might disseminate the factually incorrect frames based on the local life experience and information and touch the real aspect of China.

Regarding the frame effects, in the process of transformation from individual nodes, the communication of the country’s image under the use of polymedia has quietly broken the wall. It is especially important that this process of breaking the wall is not only reflected in the breaking of the wall in their own media use, but also in the breaking of the wall in the international media. The international students themselves play the role of “window” to some extent. They can convey the national image of China through the cross-platform way, so their real perceptions in the local media will also be the same. Therefore, the image they really perceive in the local media will spread further and produce the radiation effect of international communication.

However, it should be reminded that the interviews still observe that although there are already traces of discursive efforts at the individual level of international students, there are limitations in the broader scope of communication. On social media, due to the lack of direct local experience of most international audiences and the influence of the presses’ reporting framework, the actual situation of China’s fight against the epidemic is not very clear and objective in their mind, so that a strong climate of negative opinions unfriendly to China is formed on the platform. With this spiral of silence (Noelle-Neumann, 1993) that contradicts the local perceptions of international students, their discursive efforts also run the risk of making this ineffective. For example, nearly nine interviewees explicitly stated that they would selectively ignore false online news about China’s fight against epidemic if they saw it, rather than engaging in confrontational behaviors such as leaving comments to counteract it. Only one person, S5, said,

When I find something that is incorrectly reporting China, I will try to tell them what’s true. When I wanted to say something positive to China, I would receive some comments saying ‘she has been paid by China’, and it was both quite funny and confusing. Why did China have to pay me for I’m not a big shot?