Ryan (Yuning) Qie

"76-day Lockdown in Wuhan"

Section MS9, Keren Kuenberg

Keywords: covid-19

On January 3, 2020, Chinese officials provided World Health Organisation (WHO) with information on the discovery of a cluster of cases of "unexplained viral pneumonia" in Wuhan, the world's first public case of Covid-19. In the following three months, the virus raged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, but until now the source of the virus is still a focus of debate between China and the United States; Wuhan wet Market was forced to close, and the virus was called Wuhan virus by the President of the United States in public media, so it spread widely in the world. China is strongly dissatisfied with this. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian wrote on his Twitter account on Thursday that the US military may have brought the coronavirus to Wuhan, the Chinese city hardest affected by the epidemic.

This is just one of the debates about hot issues during the 76-day closure of Wuhan. In fact, the debate about COVID-19 between China and the West has been carried out to this day. The correctness of the city closure policy, the death of Dr. Li Wenliang, the safety of ventilators made in China, and so on, have caused great controversy among different media. Wuhan, an ordinary Chinese city, has become the "Roman Colosseum" of international political competition at a specific time. At the same time, it is developing on its own track.

Working with materials that I’ve collected, assembling a new data source – using keywords of the hot events generated during the Wuhan lockdown on Google, reports from different mainstream media in the world, and a list the search results in the form of article titles. By classifying all the materials into levels according to their lexical attributes: positive, negative, and neutral, it exposed the biased media coverage of the same events.

The original intention of the media is to better serve and enable human beings to acquire knowledge beyond the limitations of space and time, but in modern society, it is more and more difficult to distinguish the authenticity of the information transmitted by the media. Extensive collection of media information, in different information through the nature of vocabulary and the number of information to identify the participation of subjective ideas, I believe it is of great significance to compile the facts, following getting closer to the truth.