Abstract:

Xinhua News Agency tweeted a video entitled Once Upon a Virus to helping the world to understand the measures and effects of China in the process of fighting against the COVID-19, which received enthusiastic responses. Analyzing the decoding characteristics of international audiences is helpful to improve and understand a country's diplomatic practice. Guided by visual grammar and Stuart Hall's reception theory, this paper deconstructed the video Once Upon a Virus from a multimodal perspective and investigated its' comments on YouTube with the help of the data mining software GooSeeker and the corpus tool AntConc3.5.8. The present study explored the different characteristics of three decoding methods: dominant / hegemonic position, negotiated position and oppositional position. With the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the self-built corpus of comments, the result shows that audiences holding a dominant /hegemonic position towards the video outnumber those with a negotiated position or oppositional position. The audiences with dominant position fully understand and appreciate the video, including its contents, creation mode and method, and China's performance during the COVID-19 epidemic. However, people with oppositional position tend to overlook the contents because of racial stereotypes. Those who with negotiated position consider the COVID-19 epidemic as a cataclysm for all mankind, appealing for international solidarity to save lives.

Key words: Once Upon a Virus, multimodal, visual grammar, decoding model