“Kung Flu”—The Dynamics of Fear, Popular Culture, and Authenticity in the Anatomy of Populist Communication

Abstract

The article presents results of a study on the dynamics between Donald Trump’s use of terms that relate COVID-19 to China and news media publications concerning this use. Qualitative content analysis with elements of discourse analysis was conducted to 1) describe the case as a type of populist discourse on COVID-19, and 2) illustrate the following hypotheses with the help of empirical material: 1) News media and the dynamics of political communication based on the difference of friend and enemy help legitimizing populist claims and directing public attention toward them while feeding into a narrative of a diffuse category of threats that creates objects of angst and thereby enhances social cohesion. 2) With resources derived from popular culture, populists exploit the culture of political correctness, which is facilitated through the ascription of authenticity. The hypotheses emerged in the course of organizing and preliminarily examining the data collected for an ongoing broader study on populist communication and its repercussions in different public spheres in view of the following assumptions: 1) Political communication is guided by the distinction of friend and enemy. 2) In populist communication, this distinction appears as the difference of ‘the people’ and allegedly corrupt elites, including news media. 3) Angst enhances social cohesion among the audiences of populist speakers directly or mediated by fear. 4) Populist communication is more likely to produce a type of fear that populists benefit from when it depicts the elite as a diffuse category composed of various interlinked enemies. Trump’s contextualized use of the following terms in the time period between March 13 and September 15, 2020, was examined: China flu, China plague, China virus, Chinese plague, Chinese flu, Chinese virus, Wuhan virus, and Kung flu. 38 speeches from Trump’s election campaign or rallies, 28 talks at presidential events or meetings, 47 interviews, 37 press conferences, 35 tweets and seven re-tweets as well as selected news media responses were subjected to analysis. The case has been successfully described as a type of populist discourse on COVID-19 and both hypotheses have been illustrated with empirical material.

Macho populists versus COVID: Comparing political masculinities

“…That's why we're closing BORDERS to illegals' (Varela, 2020). Between 13 March and 15 September 2020, Trump described COVID in public as the 'China flu', 'China virus', 'Chinese plague', 'Wuhan virus', 'Kung flu', and so on, over 300 times (Kurilla, 2021). For the rest of his term, Trump regularly highlighted how well the US economy had been performing before Americans were victimised by a 'foreign virus'.…”

COVID-19 and its Linguistic Variants from “Miss Rona” to “Boomer Remover”

“…Indeed, China and Chinese people were immediately associated with the pandemic, reactivating the old negative stereotype of the corrupted 'Sick man of Asia' living in the home of plague because of his unusual habit of eating a wide range of exotic wild animals. Thus, offensive toponyms such as Wuhan Flu, Wuhan virus, Chinese Flu, China virus, Kung flu and China plague were launched on social platforms, also triggered by the unethical and questionable behaviour of Donald Trump who often used these toponymic compounds at public events and on Twitter as shown by a recent study on Trump's speeches during the presidential election campaign (Kurilla, 2021). According to this study, Donald Trump used China virus 228 times, China plague 43 times, Chinese virus 25 times and Chinese plague, Wuhan virus, Kung flu and Chinese flu less than 20 times.…”

“…Although the WHO warned against referring to COVID-19 as the China virus and media accused Trump of xenophobic views, these discriminatory monikers spread on Twitter mainly as hashtags. Most of these hashtags were widely adopted in the US (Kurilla, 2021) and included compounds where the head noun was often virus or coronavirus, alternately associated with Wuhan, the epicentre of the new coronavirus outbreak, or China (e.g. Chinese virus, China virus, China coronavirus, Chinese coronavirus or Chinese virus corona, Wuhan virus).…”

“…At last, another word compound used to define COVID-19 is Kung Flu, a pun on Chinese martial arts (Kung Fu) originally used by a White House official to refer to the deadly virus, although it appears that Kung Flu has been used in other contexts. Kung Flu fighter is in fact the brand of a flavoured herbal infusion that appears to protect against 'nasty viruses' and whose packaging features a caricature of an Asian fighter dressed like 'Kill Bill', the main character of Quentin Tarantino's film (Kurilla, 2021).…”

“…The US is the most active Twitter country in the world (76.9 million) and the UK is among the top 10 countries with the most Twitter users (18.4 million), while countries such as France (10 million), Spain (8.75 million) and Italy (not among the top 20 countries with the most Twitter users), are less active. Moreover, most of Twitter users in English-speaking countries belong mainly to the young generation (18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30)(31)(32)(33)(34) and partly to the middle-aged 1 Coronacoinages is a term coined by the American linguist Zimmer who first used the #coronacoinages to track the pandemic-era new blends on Twitter platform on 13 th March 2020 (Zimmer, 2020). 2 A blend is a word formed by fusing two (or sometimes more) words together, so that part of the material of these words is lost (Beliaeva, 2019).…”