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Chinese imports replace locally manufactured products in developing countries. The import of consumer goods from China to West Africa is closely linked to commercial travel, and China's border restrictions during the Covid outbreak put a near-halt to such travelling. Furthermore, the pandemic caused a global logistics crisis that disrupted supply chains with production in China. This paper asks whether Ghanaian manufacturers and artisanal producers could take advantage of these disruptions to enhance their competitive position. Did China's border closure provide space for local Ghanaian producers to thrive? We address this question by drawing on data collected among Ghanaian plastic manufacturers and furniture makers, who have faced tough competition from Chinese imports. Our analysis shows that supply chain disruptions from China led to the substitution of certain products previously imported from China, and these effects were partially sustained after the Covid-induced barriers to imports from China were removed. However, the disruptions were also costly for many Ghanaian producers, as they depended on Chinese intermediary products, tools, and other inputs. This illustrates how economic lives in Ghana and China have become so profoundly intertwined that indiscriminate decoupling is neither possible nor desirable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arguably the first thing that a reader notices of a news item, the headline serves the semantic function of providing pertinent information and the pragmatic function of appealing to target addressees. Moreover, it often embodies the stance of the news writer or the news agency on a particular issue and could program the reader's perception and interpretation of the ensuing news story in a pre-determined direction. In view of the distinctive significance of headlines in news discourse, in this paper, we analyze how the headlines of The Economist, an elite newsmagazine, frame China in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. The sample of headlines was examined for their structural components, syntactic features, as well as linguistic characteristics, and compared with a selection of the outlet's headlines on COVID responses of certain other countries. Through identifying the framing patterns adopted in the headlines and unpacking the ideological overtones encoded therein, this systematic analysis has illuminated the role and effects of the tactful employment of language in constructing country image and striking a balance between purported impartiality and ideological dispositions. Its findings and implications are expected to contribute to scholarship on media framing and inform the practice of journalistic writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chinese government refuted rumors on social media for infodemic management when COVID-19 outbroke. This study selected 80 government accounts on Sina Weibo and collected 501 valid anti-rumor posts with comments from 18 January to 29 February 2020. This paper evaluated the effectiveness of rumor debunking from the public emotions reflected in the comments. This study also examined the influence of different anti-rumor strategies, such as fact-checking, rumor response modes, and presentation forms, on the effectiveness of rumor debunking. The findings revealed that fact-checking, combined response mode and text presentation could improve the effectiveness of rumor debunking to some extent. Further analysis of the public emotions indicated a correlation between the trust in government and the effectiveness of rumor debunking. These findings suggested building a multiparticipant response mechanism with medical institutions and media to mitigate the COVID-19 infodemic through targeted strategies, thus further increasing the government's credibility via information governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the COVID-19 outbreak is a "nodal point" that will lead to certain irreversible changes in the world economic and political order in the near future. These changes, however, will not only be an outcome of the current health pandemic, but also of the economic and political pandemics that have grown worse over a period of time. This paper identifies two far-reaching consequences of the accumulating pandemics that have the potential to lead the world towards a qualitatively better future. The first is the possible death of neoliberal capitalism that will lead to higher state intervention. The second is the end of the unipolar imperialist world order and subsequent emergence of a bipolar world with a rising China as a probable occupant of the non-imperialist pole. Both these outcomes are subject to the people's resistance for a better future, and China's alacrity in undermining the hegemony of imperialist-led globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to unfold, the approach of the Chinese government remains under the spotlight, obscuring the complex landscape of responses to the outbreak within the country. Drawing upon the author's social media experiences as well as textual analysis of a wide range of sources, this paper explores how the Chinese public responded to the outbreak in complex and nuanced ways through social media. The findings challenge conventional views of Chinese social media as simply sites of self-censorship and surveillance. On the contrary, during the COVID-19 outbreak, social media became spaces of active public engagement, in which Chinese citizens expressed care and solidarity, engaged in claim-making and resistance, and negotiated with authorities. This paper situates this public engagement within a broader context of China's health-care reforms, calling attention to persistent structural and political issues, as well as the precarious positionalities of health-care workers within the health system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The quest by states to contain the spread of the Covid-19 has led to the adoption of extraordinary measures to deal with the extraordinary situation. Some of those measures have the tendency to impact on the citizens' right to healthcare as protected by the domestic laws of such states and by the relevant international instruments. The paper examines the impact of the responses by the governments in Nigeria and China to the Covid-19 pandemic to ascertain the extent to which the right to healthcare of citizens are respected, and concludes that the governments in the respective countries failed to fulfil their obligations to their citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, people with disabilities are a high-risk group, but they are also the group that is most easily ignored by public policy. Non-disabled people might not be able to imagine how many barriers disabled people encountered during this challenging period. This paper focuses on the barriers encountered by people with disabilities in China and the adjustments made to public policies in response. A deeper, social-physiological factor which should also be responsible is overlooked, and that is the 'empathy deficit'. Human rights and empathetic attitudes should go hand in hand with each other when formulation and implementation of welfare security policies for persons with disabilities during a major public health crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a new concept called virus-combat social capital and presents relevant findings from a survey of 3009 Chinese WeChat networkers. Virus-combat social capital is defined by the intensity and extensity of social connectedness under conditions of physical isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey shows that as compared to their counterparts, Chinese people with higher virus-combat social capital consistently do better in both behavioral responses and measures of quality of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Covid-19 pandemic started in Wuhan in December 2019 and then spread to the rest of China and the world. This paper examines the relationship between inter-provincial migration and the diffusion of covid-19 outbreak in Mainland China from 26 January to 6 March 2020. Statistical analysis shows that the migrants who moved into Hubei in 2010–2015 are a good indicator of the population flow from Hubei to other provinces that caused the spread of covid-19 in early 2020. Many migrants traveled back to hometown before the traffic ban of Wuhan city for the spring holiday. Thus, the migration flow from a province to Hubei in the period 2010–2015 had the highest correlation coefficient with the number of covid-19 cases in four selected dates. The population flow based on the big data from the Baidu map on 20 January 2020 was also highly correlated with the number of cases, but not as good as the above migration data. The finding demonstrates the role of established migrant networks in the spread of covid-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]