COVID-19 and sonic governmentality: Can we hear the virus speak?

Sight, sound, and politics

In his seminal essay published more than three decades ago, Martin Jay warns of the dangers of privileging vision, thereby marginalizing other senses, especially hearing. ² Jay cites extensively from theologian Jacques Ellul’s work that uses the Bible to argue against the ‘debauchery of images’. ³ ‘In the Beginning was the Word. The Word was the light of the world’, so says the Bible. According to Ellul, the contemporary world is attracted to light, and the world sees idolatrous images, while people forget to listen to God’s Word. The secularized, materialistic, and mass media-dominated world has transformed into a ‘society of the spectacle’. ⁴ Following a host of thinkers who alert us to the deceptiveness of seeing, Jay concluded that the 20th century would increasingly mistrust perception in general and vision in particular. His argument is that the crisis of ocularcentrism entails the rise of hermeneutics. As we can see from the instance of visualizing COVID-19, even after 20 years into the 21st century we are still lulled by the ‘ocular desire’. ⁵ Examining a series of popular novels and films that proliferated during the mid-1990s, Priscilla Wald identifies ‘the repetition of particular phrases, images, and story lines’ that produce a formula constructing what she calls ‘the outbreak narrative’. ⁶ In slightly different versions, the narrative tells about the novelty of the danger, usually brought in by a stranger, scaring and threatening but ultimately forming the community. And it is not only popular culture. Wald observes the same elements in the ‘real’ viral spread of HIV and SARS.

The outbreak narrative, however, seems to be without a soundtrack. Wald acknowledges the ‘visual authority’ of certain images to which she draws our attention. ⁷ After all, the virus became visible through the invention of an optical instrument: the microscope. ⁸ It is here that we want to induce a shift from sight and politics to sound and politics, not in the sense of losing sight of sight, but of pointing out the importance of sound in issues of power, discipline, and population management. As we will see in the case studies, even when we direct our attention to sound, we cannot really ignore the visual. We argue for the need to sensitize ourselves to the ways that sound features in the tactics of governmentality. Citing George Rosen’s notion of ‘terrifying urgency’, ⁹ Wald observes that the typical outbreak narrative mobilizes what Rosen calls ‘the administrative machinery for disease prevention, sanitary supervision, and, in general, protection of community health’. ¹⁰ And this co-construction and interdependence, under the duress of the viral threat, may lead to two scenarios: overturning or reinforcing governing authority. So far, the evidence leans toward the latter. ¹¹

It is perhaps not surprising that governmentality studies have long been oriented to visuality. In addition to the general persuasiveness of ocularcentrism, one major factor is the significance Michel Foucault himself has attached to sight. Describing governmentality as a myriad of non-coercive tactics whereby populations are managed and controlled – ‘the conduct of conduct’ ¹² – Foucault also mobilized the notion of ‘gaze’ and Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon to illustrate the mechanism of surveillance and its functioning with power and discipline. ¹³ ‘Visibility is a trap’ is Foucault’s succinct warning. ¹⁴ According to Eric Anthamatten, ‘It was the perfection of managing and controlling bodies, not through the brutality of public torture, but through the psychology and efficiency of surveillance.’ ¹⁵ In short, Big Brother is watching you. With the increasing penetration of visual and surveillance cultures, ¹⁶ and the increasing sophistication of visually oriented technologies, governmentality studies continue, if not intensify, the line of visual inquiries. ¹⁷

The Chinese situation is no different. Florian Schneider’s book-length treatise dissects China’s digital nationalism by way of technological infrastructure, which, he argues among other things, is sustaining and sustained by Bentham’s panopticon. ¹⁸ Gladys Chong’s study of Alipay’s social credit system demonstrates the omnipresence of monitors that allow people to track other people. ¹⁹ These are but a couple of instances of recent publications on the relationship between sight and politics in contemporary China. There are surely other inquiries into governmentality that follow other paths ²⁰ – but inquiries into the sonic remain largely silent, save for the rich tradition of Chinese popular music studies. ²¹ Our inquiry addresses this research gap, as guided by what we have heard during the pandemic in China.

At the same time, we are also building on the series of investigations in the field of sound studies that concern issues of power, among which is an important perspective that takes sound or soundscape as a site of resistance. ²² More recently, Sidra Lawrence, taking Detroit as a case, elucidates how communities and individuals use creative tactics to intervene in soundscape configuration. ²³ Lilian Radovac’s 2014 study of Occupy Wall Street focuses on the ways the ‘human microphone’ challenges the state’s monopoly of public speech at the protest site. ²⁴ Noise, as researched and argued by Jeffrey Monaghan and Kevin Walby, is instrumental to sustaining the momentum of public protests. ²⁵ Calling the chants of dissent on rooftops in Iran in 2009 ‘sonic performative’, Roshanak Kheshti analyses how this collective act transformed the nation. ²⁶ Kheshti’s work, in turn, draws on the notion of the ‘ethical landscape’ posited by Charles Hirschkind in his classic study of cassette-sermon listeners in Egypt in the mid-1990s. Hirschkind’s study demonstrates how this collective sonic performance forms an Islamic soundscape, enacting Islamic counter-publics and counter-politics. ²⁷

Given the long tradition of conflating seeing with overseeing, it is understandable how sound may be readily conceptualized as something beyond the gaze, the panopticon. What attracted us to sound in the field were two instances where state control was intended, and the sonic was part and parcel of governmentality. Here we align with scholarship that examines sound not only as sites of resistance but also as possible means of state power and control. For instance, Carolyn Birdsall goes beyond the well-known Nazi propaganda images to study the use of radio and loudspeakers as instruments of control and power. ²⁸ Thokozani Mhlambi’s study of loudspeaker broadcasts in South Africa in the 1940s analyses them as a ‘disciplinary practice of control’. ²⁹ Nathan Jurgenson’s work on the Occupy movements demonstrates that both protestors and police used sound as their political tool. ³⁰ Similarly, Michael Bull’s book studies the object of the siren through myth, Cold War practices, and popular culture to recuperate the sonic layers of power. ³¹ These are but a handful of inquiries that articulate the kind of complexity we are asserting with regard to the relationship between sound and politics. Given the limited scope and exploratory nature of this study, we cannot and should not make claims beyond its relevance to China. It remains, however, our intention to provoke more thought and more research into sonic governmentality in China and elsewhere.

Concerning research, we would have liked to go into the field and gather first-hand data. But the pandemic travel and movement restrictions affect everyone, including the researchers. For the present inquiry, we were hesitant to conduct interviews via mediated means; we also wondered if respondents in China would be willing and trusting enough to participate. It is beyond the scope of this article to reflect on and perhaps reimagine how to do fieldwork in such times as the COVID-19 pandemic era in general, and in China in particular. In times when non-mediated human contact is difficult, how do researchers go into the field and engender rapport and trust that are essential for good qualitative work? At the other end of the spectrum, as our lives become even more deeply interwoven with social media and digital platforms during the pandemic period, how can we study media without being media-centric? ³² For the time being, we confine ourselves to an acknowledgement of inadequacy, a feeling that we have not done enough. We could only rely on the first author’s first-hand observations (of herself and her circle of friends); incidentally, 19 of her students who were staying in different parts of the nation helped with the gathering of sound samples from the field. But mostly we sifted through data from secondary online sources. This work, performed in COVID-19-era China, made us even more sharply aware of the modest aspirations qualitative research is wont to: it does not claim to be representative nor conclusive.

An intimate history: Sound and the state in modern China

From its very introduction into China during the second decade of the 20th century, wireless communication in the form of radio broadcasting has always been intimately connected to state power and political intentions. According to archival records, China’s first broadcasting station was founded in Shanghai, and the first transmission took place on 23 January 1923. ³³ During the Republican years, all major political forces contending for territorial domination and ideological control set up broadcasting stations, from the Beiyang Government (1912–28) and later the Kuomintang Government (1928–49), to the puppet state installed by Japan, as well as the newly formed Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Despite a number of non-governmental, commercially driven enterprises, radio broadcasts were generally conceived as part and parcel of a nation-building project, a means to disseminate political messages, to rally popular support.

Broadcasting was privileged in Republican China especially for its sonic dimensions. An officially sanctioned commentary compared press with radio, confirming the advantage of the latter in affecting, and thus nationalizing. Noting the nationwide coverage of wireless transmissions, the commentary argues that ‘written texts work less effectively with the people than verbal communication’, especially in light of high illiteracy in those days. ³⁴ In addition to verbal communication’s capacity to convey all sorts of affective expression and evoke ‘direct responses’ among the listeners, radio broadcasting was credited with carrying out a concomitant nation-building mission, namely standardizing language. As modern Chinese-language pioneer Yuen Ren Chao pointed out: ‘Among various tools to promote the unification of the national language, radio broadcasting has the most extensive influence.’ ³⁵ Meanwhile, human voices also found their way into another technological innovation and cultural genre: popular music. During the third decade of the 20th century, popular music emerged in Republican cities; whether played via records, films, or radio broadcasts, this sonic instrument contributed to the popularization of a standardized verbal language.

At the same time, the CCP started its radio broadcasting station in Yan’an in 1940, introducing not only the party’s first propaganda front but also the start of ideological struggles between the two political forces on the sonic front. ³⁶ A CCP archival record is illustrative of the party’s emphasis on radio broadcasting’s affective, propagandistic, and political potentialities. Referring to a radio report on a Mao text, the record conjures a vivid scenario in which the presenter ‘gives almost all of his energies, trying to transform every word, every sentence into a bullet, hitting the heart of every Kuomintang reactionary!’ ³⁷ Following the Kuomintang’s retreat to Taiwan and the establishment of Communist China in 1949, the CCP took over the former Kuomintang-run facilities manufacturing sound-related equipment and products, subsuming them into a central organ responsible for broadcasting, which, in the years to come, has maintained its role as ‘party mouthpiece’ and has consolidated its function of population management and collective governance – the historical context in which our inquiry is situated.

The Communist Revolution ushered in another development in China’s sonic history: the ‘broadcasting-to-rural-areas’ (广播下乡) directive in effect turned broadcasting into what might arguably be termed ‘narrowcasting’. Instead of having rural households instal radio sets, the new authorities decided to erect loudspeakers in rural public spaces. These loudspeakers were connected to broadcasting stations in the villages, forming local public announcement systems, which were linked to broadcasting stations in their counties, forming an extensive wired broadcasting network in the rural areas. In 1956, there were 506,700 village loudspeakers; by 1976, the number had increased to 113 million. ³⁸ These are the loudspeakers we will examine in their contemporary mobilization.

The ideological struggle between the Kuomintang and the CCP continued after 1949 via radio transmission. One expression of the Cold War dynamics was Kuomintang-backed broadcasting stations aimed at the audience across the straits. These stations were called ‘enemy stations’ by the CCP. From 1954 to 1967, four broadcasting teams were successively set up in Jinmen by the Kuomintang’s Ministry of National Defence, and they were responsible for transmitting political propaganda, including popular music 24 hours a day, via 2400-watt megaphones and loudspeakers. ‘Eavesdropping on enemy station radio’ has become a fond collective memory for mainland intellectual youth of the 1970s and 1980s. ³⁹ Teresa Teng’s music was hugely popular and her voice was considered particularly appealing.

The intimate history of sound and the state in China continued, with a more recent manifestation being National Memorial Day (国家公祭日). In 2008, a major earthquake shook the nation. In response to severe casualties and widespread devastation in Sichuan, particularly Wenchuan, the Chinese government decreed three days of national mourning, 19–21 May. During this period, official buildings would fly the national flag at half mast, while entertainment activities – including the torch relay organized for the Beijing Olympic – were suspended. At 2.28 p.m. on 19 May, a three-minute silence was observed, amidst air raid sirens and tooting horns of automobiles, trains, and ships. ⁴⁰ In subsequent years, similar memorial days were announced. In 2014, an earlier historical event was invoked for an annual expression of national sentiment. That year, the National People’s Congress decided to designate one day in the year to commemorate victims of the Second World War, particularly those killed by Japanese soldiers during the Nanjing Massacre. On 13 December, remembered as the day hostilities began in 1937, memorial events will be held throughout the nation. In 2020, the year of COVID-19, a similar memorial day was called for. With a slightly different name, the National Day of Mourning, it took a largely similar form as the other National Memorial Day, and we will analyse the former’s sonic politics in the context of the latter.

Sirens and whistles

China is not the only nation in the world to mobilize the sonic as a tool of empowerment amidst the pandemic. The so-called Clap for Carers, where populations were rallied to clap their hands collectively as an essentially sonic but also visual and corporal tribute to caring professionals, has been organized in many localities all over the world. Studying the event in the United Kingdom, Helen Wood and Beverley Skeggs point out the inadequacy of such a ‘sentimental mood’, which only served to distract people from the ‘state-sponsored neglect’ suffered by the healthcare professionals during years of austerity measures in the United Kingdom. The authors argue that unleashing ‘anger’ would have an affect that better and more truly addresses their needs. In this sense, it is interesting to observe in the Chinese case that an official initiative to activate collectively ‘a sentimental mood’ ⁴¹ not only served as a tool of governmentality but at the same time opened up spaces for anger.

It was on 3 April that the Chinese state announced that the following day would be a National Day of Mourning to commemorate those who had passed away with COVID-19, in particular ‘the martyrs who sacrificed their lives fighting COVID-19’. ⁴² It fell on the day of the traditional Qingming Festival, where Chinese people would traditionally sweep their family graves and commemorate their ancestors. In addition to the evocation of Chinese tradition, of piety and observance, and the usual conflation of family with nation, the new mourning day also embodied the inter-historicity with the other National Memorial Day. This time it was not the Japanese army but an alien virus that was portrayed as a new enemy, underscoring a similar narrative of national suffering, survival, and resilience. For the occasion, all public entertainment activities were suspended, and national flags were flown at half mast. Major online platforms were notified to adjust their visual representation. Their opening page, for instance, became predominantly black and white. Entertainment and other ‘light’ items were temporarily removed to make way for banners announcing events related to official ceremonies in Beijing as well as in other localities. Other more traditional forms of mass media refashioned themselves accordingly.

At 10 a.m., the entire nation was called upon to observe a three-minute silence. During this episode of remembering the 64 heroic victims of COVID-19, air raid sirens and horns of automobiles, trains, and ships were sounded – just as on the other national days commemorating the Wenchuan Earthquake and the Nanjing Massacre. We argue that these three minutes of foregrounding certain sounds and backgrounding others, of announcing audibly and silently who is in control of both the landscape and soundscape, ⁴³ are an important component of governmentality. While individuals might choose not to watch (mediatized or otherwise), the cacophony of sirens in combination with other mourning and alerting sounds could hardly go unnoticed among, let alone escape, the Chinese people. As the second author argues elsewhere, in contradistinction to eyes that can be opened, closed, diverted or simply freed by oversight, our ears stay open and are supposed to be ‘indiscriminate and democratic to the outside world’. ⁴⁴ Precisely because of this particular trait of this particular feature of human anatomy, the practice of hearing, or not, is always already a matter of ‘positionality’. ⁴⁵

To express it differently, we want to draw attention to the paradox of this act of decreeing silence and sirens. On the one hand, the omnipresent sonic experience was intended to whip up sentimental feelings – like Clap for Carers mentioned earlier – of grief, loss, and tribute. Simultaneously, it sought to summon everyone who could not help but hear the blaring sirens – a loud and clear symbol of warfare and danger – to remember, to stand together with the martyrs and victims, and to protect the nation, while other horns wailed in response to the call. Searching through the database of the People’s Daily using the term ‘air raid sirens’, we located 90 reports pointing to three major uses of such sirens during peaceful times: national defence drills; natural disaster warnings; and mourning events. ⁴⁶ These three uses, as we observe, were easily conflated: mourning to sensitize the people to danger, ultimately to defend themselves.

During these three minutes, every citizen was asked to observe a moment of silence, and many people in public spaces were seen taking off their hats, closing their eyes, bowing or lowering their heads. Collectively and ritualistically, the sonic and the human formed a soundscape and landscape reminiscent of what Murray Schafer calls ‘new orchestration’. ⁴⁷ Flagging the sonic manifestation, an official report issued by the People’s Daily on the SinaWeibo platform states:

Did you hear them? #This is the sound of China today#. Today is Qingming Festival, the nation is mourning. Will you remember these sounds? . . . We pay tribute to the martyrs, grieve for the victims. After the storm, life will continue, and those who are still alive must walk on courageously and determinedly. ⁴⁸

This sonic mobilization, however, was not only an attempt to create, consolidate, and finally collect memories for the people as a form of crisis management and empowerment; more importantly, it also constituted a sonic ‘disruption’ to people’s everyday lives, a moment of departure from the routine, of defamiliarizing the familiar, a moment of historical proportions. Such sonic mobilization, we hasten to add, must be examined in a larger context of enforced silence, in which urban populations were increasingly confined to their dwellings, in which traffic clamour was reduced, social contacts were curbed, restaurants were closed, and live entertainment was suspended – all due to pandemic control. It was in this changed landscape and soundscape that commemorative sirens and silence as orchestrated by the authorities made their mark, alerting people to a sharp sense of making and partaking in history. It, in turn, fed back into everyday life with ‘public meaning’ and reshaped the routine and the familiar. ⁴⁹ The sonic, in short, announces the historic and quotidian at the same time. This, at least, is what the sirens and wailing horns were intended to evoke and what the party-state apparatus aspired to achieve on the 4 April memorial day. Reverting to Wood and Skeggs’ critique against Clap for Carers in the United Kingdom, we hear something whispering, trembling, or well-nigh whistling, a voice human and unwilling to comply with the appeal to make history. It was anger.

This anger can be traced back to the end of 2019 when COVID-19 started making its presence felt in China. One of the doctors working on the medical frontline sent a message to his WeChat group – which further disseminated the message to other circles of friends – sounding the alarm about a mysterious, threatening, infectious disease. This doctor was Li Wenliang, later portrayed and acclaimed as a brave whistle-blower and a folk hero on Chinese social media. However, initially, Li and seven other colleagues who sent similar messages to the outside world were denounced by local police for spreading fake news. On 6 February 2020, Li passed away, due to complications of the virus he contracted while taking care of COVID-19 patients. The first author of this article, based in Beijing, found her WeChat account inundated with images of a burning candle. The people who posted these images were expressing their grief for Li as much as their discontent toward the authorities who had framed him as a rumour-monger.

The discontent found its moment of eruption in anger on 10 March. People (人物), a magazine with a CCP background, published an article on its WeChat public account, carrying an interview with Ren Aifen, a doctor who was based in the same Wuhan hospital as Li was. In the article, Ren recounted how she drew her colleagues’ attention to the dire situation and was subsequently reprimanded by her superiors. Later, on that same day, the article was deleted, triggering a multitude of angry responses on social media. Very quickly, various ‘smart’ versions of the same article found their way around and were circulated, as acts of popular resistance. Fuelling all these sentiments in Chinese society was a diary kept and published by writer Fang Fang. For a period of 60 days, from 25 January through 25 March, Fang posted an entry, documenting her city Wuhan during the lockdown. Her posts enjoyed high circulation, reaching 3.8 million followers, and the diary hashtag was clicked on 670 million times. ⁵⁰ At the same time, Fang Fang’s Diary also became a site of polemic confrontation and social controversy, between those who defended Fang Fang’s freedom of speech and courage to speak the truth, and those who accused Fang Fang of fabricating fake reports, disturbing the social order, and causing harm to the nation.

It was at this juncture that the authorities announced that the National Day of Mourning would take place on 4 April, in an attempt to reconfigure social and collective remembering, to rewrite history, and to reorganize a new social and national unity and harmony, an act of governmentality to normalize and legitimize political authority. ⁵¹ Part of that act of rewriting history was to reposition Li Wenliang as a martyr, no longer a folk hero but a state-sanctioned, national hero. Li was named as one of the 14 doctors in Hubei who sacrificed their lives on the medical frontline. His status as party member was foregrounded by his family members and the media. While the sirens were sounded, some Chinese, nevertheless, heard whistles. They remembered, instead, how badly the authorities had treated Li and how they had tried to silence the whistle-blower; those who recalled realized how ironic the sirens sounded some months later. We came across instances where people put on their headsets to shut out the sirens. One post summarizes a common resentment this way: ‘When we want to commemorate, they don’t let us. Today, they force us to do so in this way.’ While the act of sonic governmentality was launched to collectivize an ‘us’, it had already generated a ‘them’; the sirens conjured up the whistles.

What we would like to argue is the following paradox: while these articulations might have been subdued by sirens and wailing horns on that memorial day, they might not have been there in the first place had it not been for the sirens and wailing horns deployed during the day. The new orchestration aimed at producing a uniform sound generated noise at the same time. The angry outburst eventually subsided. But for as long as it lasted, it produced an alternative sound, some noise.

Loudspeakers and Douyin

From the highly centralized sound produced on 4 April, we turn our attention to the myriad loudspeakers scattered throughout the nation. Reminiscent of the official analogy of the anti-pandemic effort in waging a war, loudspeakers and the wired network of public announcement systems were quickly mobilized to disseminate messages to areas and populations not accessible by wireless communication facilities. Loudspeakers were also installed for this new purpose, for instance, at refuse collection points, outside public lavatories, and on mobile vans. Village leaders, usually party cadres, and mostly male, were heard admonishing local rural residents to wear face masks, to avoid crowded places, to clean their hands diligently, and so forth. In some localities, the broadcasts began around 5.30 a.m. and were repeated till 10 p.m. In others, certain periods of time would be selected for broadcasting during mornings, afternoons, and evenings. ⁵²

What attracted media, as well as our, attention to the recuperation of this particular revolutionary legacy was a clip posted on the popular platform Douyin (known as TikTok outside China). The clip showed some unremarkable shots of a Chinese village, including loudspeakers, and was accompanied by the voice of a village cadre, in the local dialect and in a highly vernacular style, reminding, if not commanding, his fellow villagers to cease making visits to families and friends. ⁵³ It was the Chinese New Year period, the usual peak of such social contacts, and thus with a heightened risk of infection. The clip went viral, and this loudspeaker practice was swiftly sanctioned, and heralded by official media as ‘excellent work’. ⁵⁴ Subsequent to this online sensation, a series of clips more or less similar to this ‘original’ one also went viral. We also found a series of media reports covering the loudspeaker phenomenon. According to the results of one online archive research exercise, 131 reports were observed for the period between 23 January and 30 March. Analysing the content of these reports, the researcher offers an upbeat conclusion, confirming the efficacy of this wired form of communication in combatting COVID-19. ⁵⁵ The use of this specific medium – loudspeakers – to inculcate official messages and to influence public behaviour was historically prevalent when loudspeakers were one of the few broadcasting possibilities. ⁵⁶ This act of sonic governmentality is also found in many other parts of the world, especially in rural and developing areas. ⁵⁷ Amidst this historical and global deployment of loudspeakers, we examine the Chinese case and foreground three aspects: top–down directive; popular appropriation; and the insertion of the local.

Reverting to the abovementioned meta-analysis of media reports, we want to underscore the surge and volume of such reports, as well as their uniformly positive tone. The following report, penned by two officials of the Inner Mongolia Television and Broadcasting Authorities, is typical. ⁵⁸ ‘The pandemic is our imperative; to combat it is our duty’, thus starts the report. Crediting the sonic efficacy of the rural loudspeaker networks, it notes: ‘Every day during the pandemic, all 39,000 loudspeakers sound to all village households in Inner Mongolia, spreading anti-pandemic messages to 4.523 million people.’ The writers use a term for this rural success story, ‘sounding throughout every village’ (村村响), which appears in many of the reports we have encountered. ‘Sounding everyday’ (天天响) is the term used in another equally positive report, this time regarding Anhui, to describe the popularity of the initiative. ⁵⁹

While such affirmative reports abound, we would like to draw attention to what this report goes on to say. Alluding to what Henry Jenkins may call ‘convergence culture’, ⁶⁰ the report highlights how mainstream media morph into new media, and how mainstream media reports on the anti-pandemic efforts enjoy much wider online circulation and readership. Taking a cue from this and other similar reports, we argue that they are in effect articulating the new ‘integrated’ media policy put forward by President Xi Jinping. On 25 January 2019, Xi addressed the Central Politburo on media development, focusing on ‘convergence’. In this seminal speech, he expressed the urgency to speed up the convergent development of media. The key was to synch what could be termed ‘legacy media’ and ‘new media’ – the former is centralized and involves one-way communication while the latter is interactive and comparatively decentralized. Evidently, this directive is a response to the media ecology we are living in. At the same time, what we have observed from the surge of reports on the use of loudspeakers should serve as a reminder that the convergence of media does not only involve ‘typical’ legacy media and new media. In this particular instance, loudspeakers are mobilized, and the reports, by highlighting loudspeakers, are complying with and promoting the official take on media convergence. We therefore argue not only for critical attention to this new top–down directive, but also for the need to remain alert for such atypical legacy media as loudspeakers.

Our study builds on recent studies concerning the socialist media infrastructure. Jie Li’s historical study demonstrates how radio and loudspeakers contributed to the Chinese revolution in the Mao era. Andrew Jones, in his book on Chinese popular music in the 1960s, devotes one chapter to ‘quotation songs’, detailing the impact of such media infrastructure on rural China of that time. Taken together, they remind us how these then revolutionary, now legacy, media have continued to matter. ⁶¹ Indeed, we must also remember that we cannot investigate loudspeakers in isolation. That the village cadres’ wired announcements have become a nationwide talking point is not only due to news reporting, as already mentioned, but also, if not more importantly, because of popular appropriation as seen on various online platforms. Visually and technically simple clips, sometimes with a static camera pointed at a particular speaker, together with a soundtrack of the announcement, attract millions of views. While such simple productions dominate, we have located other slightly more sophisticated productions. One popular series of clips involve a combination of loudspeakers with surveillance technology, namely drones. As shown in these clips, drones are being sent out in villages to check if people are observing the anti-pandemic measures. One viral clip shows an elderly woman, standing in a public space without a face mask, staring at the camera. Then we hear a voice on a nearby loudspeaker urging the woman to go home. She looks baffled and turns around. Clips in the third category require perhaps even more technical skills to produce; they show essentially the same images as the first – static loudspeakers speaking. However, they are edited with a variety of added features, such as a ‘modern’ music soundtrack, comical emoji-style visual elements, and so forth.

The final category of clips we have identified concerns the appropriation of the genre by celebrities. For instance, entertainer Wang Yibo, a native of Hunan, was asked on a television show to imitate a Hunan village cadre’s loudspeaker address. The clip that was subsequently posted online attracted popular and media attention, as well as heated debates. ⁶² This instance, we believe, is indicative. First, while convergence is the keyword mobilized in Jenkins’s as well as Xi’s thinking on the latest phase of media development, we note different possible scenarios under the umbrella term of convergence. There is tension. Wang’s imitation of the village cadre, or television’s appropriation of a phenomenon configured by loudspeakers and Douyin, embodies the tension of media’s power struggle to represent the popular. The other note, relatedly, concerns the same struggle to represent the local. While the popular online appropriation should generally testify to an intense interest in the local, the controversy – Wang was accused of mocking the village cadre’s accent – adds weight to the strong sentiment among many online commentators that local culture should not be objectified, ridiculed, and disenfranchised; it should be respected.

Finally, we discuss the local. In his study of radio use in the African context of the 1940s, Thokozani Mhlambi asks a poignant question: how can something non-human, mediated, and technologically embedded produce such human effects? ⁶³ While his concern is radio, we are similarly intrigued by the loudspeaker, or, more precisely, its efficacy and popularity. To begin with the obvious, loudspeakers do project human voice. And here, we are not referring to the metaphysical or literary notions of voice, that, in David Appelbaum’s words, ‘is not oral, nor subvocal, is not vocal at all’. ⁶⁴ We refer to the voice of village cadres – admittedly human, but at the same time, from what we could hear, somewhat hollow, metallic, remote, sometimes machine-like or even robotic, characteristics often attributed to the sonic quality of messages conveyed through loudspeakers. In fact the messages, which are predominantly broadcast in the local dialects or sometimes together with standard Putonghua, are hardly comprehensible to those who are not well versed in the local dialects.

The use of highly localized dialects, and thus the distinction between insiders and outsiders, the mechanism to include and exclude, is what, we argue, produces the human effects. Those who speak the local languages feel included. ‘It speaks the language I understand’ is a common comment. If, as Benedict Anderson’s seminal study argues, national press serves to evoke an imagined community, the loudspeakers during COVID-19 time enact a sonic, linguistic coverage that forms the outlines of a community that is palpable, audible, and intimate. ⁶⁵ Furthermore, the village cadres also deploy a host of forms that are grounded in local oral cultures, and ‘speak’ more directly to the local people.

In fact, so many local forms of quyi (曲艺) – an umbrella term for oral, folk performing arts in different parts of China – were used that the media were quick to dramatize all the village cadres’ loudspeaker performances into a quyi battle. ⁶⁶ Among these quyi expressions, lianhualao (莲花落) was arguably the most popular genre. Listed as China’s intangible cultural heritage, this almost 1000-year-old performing art remains popular in northern China. The solo performer plays with two bamboo percussion instruments, beating a rhythmic score against which lines are ‘rapped’ in a seven-character format. The ready supply of clips featuring village cadres spreading their anti-virus messages in lianhualao format underlines its affective appeal. The local flavour is also accentuated by the village cadres themselves. In addition to adopting different quyi, they improvise; they crack jokes; they are audibly short of breath because they have just been hurrying to speak into the broadcasting microphones; they invariably shout; and they address fellow villagers as their cadres, as someone whom they know and who cares for them. Jiediqi (接地气, roughly translated as ‘grounded’ or literally meaning ‘connected to the air of the ground’) is a vernacular term commonly deployed to describe the loudspeaker practices.

By arguing for the insertion of the local as a sonic practice, we do not dispute nor dilute the very fact that the local is primarily reiterating the official discourse. The loudspeakers deployed are speaking what state and party powers want them to. And their popularity outside the immediate locality is very likely an indication of their exotic appeal – in terms of language, oral culture, village cadre, and all the manifestation of ‘otherness’ – particularly to urbanites. What we maintain is that these are still moments when the local is heard. This sonic act of governmentality is not only nationalizing, but also simultaneously localizing.

Coda

To conclude, we would like to take from this inquiry some guiding posts for further research possibilities into sound and politics in the Chinese context. We confine ourselves to four: media, affect, gender, and education. First, regarding media research, we would like to repeat our caution against ocularcentrism and the associated forms of media that are increasingly embedded in advanced, digital technologies. This is particularly relevant when, as phrased by Seyram Avle in her study of radio-cum-mobile phones in Ghana, ‘the majority of the world in the global south does not fit what has been named the “WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic)” populations’, the site of most media, communication and technology research. ⁶⁷ Our case study of rural areas in China is illuminating, where loudspeakers emerge as the official mouthpiece par excellence. Now that media researchers are drawn toward the implication of convergence, we call for more sensitivity and research on media not easily covered by either new or legacy media.

Clearly missing in this inquiry are the people and their hearing experience. As early as the late 19th century, researchers were already interested in the relationship between human hearing and psychology. ⁶⁸ With imbricating interest and scholarship concerning affect theorizations and practices, one important trajectory of research, we believe, will be to investigate the capacity of sound to affect. In more specific terms of governmentality, the remit is to find out how human ears hear, listen, absorb, filter, and process sound, and how human bodies react to and act on what they hear – and perhaps make themselves heard; in short, the intricate ways populations are controlled, more or less.

Earlier, we referred to voice. We did not go further to discuss the possible gendered aspect. In the Chinese case, most of the village cadres are men. In national ceremonies such as the 4 April event, we also hear predominantly male voices. How do people react to male and female voices? Are there differences at all? How about intersecting gendered voices with other categories, such as age or religion? In Kheshti’s study of rooftop chanting in Iran, Islamic women occupy the rooftops because they are usually more restricted in other spaces, such as public streets and the Internet. ⁶⁹ Building on the limited body of work on gendered voices, we propose the gendered implications with sound and politics as another trajectory of further research.

Finally, we take a cue from Nicola Di Croce’s reflection on what she calls ‘listening education’. ⁷⁰ Situating her thinking at the crossroads of sound studies and public policy design, Di Croce proposes to move from music education to sound education and then to sonic education, and eventually to develop a participatory attitude for communities to feel responsible and shape their sonic environments. We have reservations as to how this kind of collective participation might take shape in the Chinese context. Nevertheless, we want to reiterate her appeal to foster public sonic awareness beyond music, which has become part of the standard curriculum and a dominant component of sonic education. Learning from the two case studies, we see the importance of sound in politics; we suggest further research on current sonic education in China.