The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused an unprecedented public health crisis worldwide. Its intense politicization constantly made headlines, especially regarding the use of face masks as a safety precaution. However, the extent to which public opinion is polarized on wearing masks has remained anecdotal and the verbal representation of this polarization has not been explored. This study examined the types, themes, temporal trends, and exchange patterns of hashtags about mask wearing posted from March 1 to August 1, 2020 by Twitter users based in the United States. On the one hand, we found a stark rhetorical polarization in terms of semantic antagonism between pro- and anti-mask hashtags, exponential frequency increases of both types of hashtags during the period under study, in parallel to growing COVID-19 case counts, state mask mandates, and media coverage. On the other hand, the results showed an asymmetric participatory polarization in terms of a predominance of pro-mask hashtags along with an “echo chamber” effect in the dominant pro-mask group, which ignored the subversive rhetoric of the anti-mask minority. Notwithstanding the limitations of the research, this study provides a nuanced account of the digital polarization of public opinion on mask wearing. It draws attention to political polarization both as a rhetorical phenomenon and as a participatory process.

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This study examines the lived experiences of identity of 4 Chinese Heritage Language (CHL) students participating in a year-long study abroad program in China. In a narrative inquiry, we draw on 2 mutually complementary theoretical frameworks-the Theory of Communities of Practice (Wenger, 1998) and Self-Categorization Theory -to shed light on the individual trajectories of identity development, which cannot be fully unveiled by proficiency assessment. By exploring the behavioral, socio-psychological, and discursive dimensions of CHL identity in the ancestral homeland, which is largely overlooked in CHL research, this study contributes to a more comprehensive theory of CHL development. It also provides empirical grounding for meaningful intervention in study abroad programming and pre-departure preparation.

This article examines metaphor choice in China's official anti-corruption discourse. Drawing on corpus data, we analyze the metaphors used by the Chinese Communist Party and its flagship newspaper, the People' s Daily, to frame the anti-corruption campaign and influence public perception. It is found that both embodied experience and cultural models are recruited as the metaphoric vehicles or source domains for the strategic profiling of different aspects of corruption and anticorruption actions as the target domain. Additionally, metaphor choice is systematically different in the Chinese and the English versions of the party newspaper, reflecting that metaphor use is sensitive to sociocultural context, especially to the knowledge base within an epistemic community.

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