Rhetoric of a Global Epidemic: Transcultural Communication about SARS

3. Rhetorics of Alternative Media, Censorship, and SARS

104 3 Rhetorics of Alternative Media, Censorship, and SARS How does emergency health risk communication operate amid scientific uncertainty and official silence? What role does public communication play in such risk politics? To help address these questions, this chapter reports the results of a rhetorical study that examined health risk communication about SARS in China during a period of utter confusion and official silence. The initial stage of the SARS outbreak, which occurred between November 2002 and March 2003 in Guangdong Province, was characterized by little official media coverage. However, my research demonstrates that alternative media were anything but silent about SARS during that stage of the epidemic. As early as January 2003, speculations, rumors, official clarifications, and confusion pervaded SARS reports from alternative media, such as independent websites and word-of-mouth communication. As a response to these messages from alternative-media sources, waves of mass panic buying took place on February 8 and February 10 in numerous cities in Guangdong.1 These two waves of mass panic buying were followed by the first and only official press conference that the Guangdong municipal government offered; in this press conference, government officials claimed that the local epidemic was under control. The panic buying also produced an anomaly in the silence about the SARS outbreak in Chinese print media prior to April: an unusual, closely clustered wave of intensive reports (altogether, 605) took place in Guangdong regional newspapers from February 11 to February 20 (see fig. 3.1).2 In contrast , People’s Daily, the official tongue of the Communist Party of China, remained silent about the outbreak from January to March. This anomaly in the news reporting pattern was preceded and followed by media underreporting and, most of the time, official silence. However, numerous rounds of panic buying in Guangzhou and neighboring cities took place, and the rampant rumors about a mysterious, fatal epidemic, perhaps a mutated type of avian flu, soon caught the attention of not only transcultural media in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Western countries, such as the 105 Alternative Media, Censorship, and SARS Figure 3.1. Number of articles about SARS in People’s Daily and Guangdong regional newspapers, January to April 20, 2003 United States and Great Britain, but also the United Nations health agency WHO. As a result, the outbreak of mysterious pneumonia in Guangdong entered the transcultural risk communication network and became the focus of international biopolitical surveillance. How can rhetoric function to communicate the risks of an emerging health crisis to the public when the dominant power structure imposes censorship? What role did rhetoric play in the production of the two rounds of mass panic buying, and how did risk communication operate in Guangdong amid official silence? Many rhetorical and critical studies have been conducted to analyze how public health crises were constructed in public discourses (Barnes; Brookey; Leiss and Powell; Rosenberg; Scott; Treichler). Scholarly attention has recently focused on the coverage of the global epidemic of SARS in international mainstream media (Kaufman; Kleinman and Watson). However, the ways in which alternative media can function as extra-institutional channels to challenge and contradict official media and to communicate imminent risks to the public have been largely neglected in the previous work on health crises. In the case of China, alternative media include independent overseas Chinese 106 Alternative Media, Censorship, and SARS websites, contesting foreign media, and guerrilla media, such as text messaging and word-of-mouth communication. Alternative media function as sites of conflict and contention that challenge dominant power structures and communicate to a large audience across geographical and media boundaries. The classification of contesting foreign media, which may be mainstream in their own countries, as alternative media in China is based on their historical functions of disseminating dissenting viewpoints and subverting the dominant propaganda in China, as discussed in chapter 1. During the global epidemic of SARS, foreign media functioned to facilitate transnational risk communication about the epidemic and to penetrate China’s censorship by obtaining and publicizing unauthorized risk messages from people with access to such information. The examination of the rhetorical and cultural potential of alternative media is particularly significant in the study of unofficial risk communication practices in countries that strategically control print and online media through constant surveillance. In his discussion of tactics and strategies, Michel de Certeau defines tactic as “a calculated action” without a place or “a spatial or institutional localization .” As “an...