Social media reconstructions of urban identity during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly affected people in urban areas. This article reports on a comparative empirical study of the pandemic in Guangzhou and Xi'an in 2021 and analyses how residents responded to social media during the crisis. Using Baidu's hot search time machine to search for hot topics related to the spread of disease during each outbreak of COVID-19, we collected 35 and 41 hashtags for Guangzhou's and Xi'an's epidemics, respectively. Based on a thematic analysis of those hashtags, we considered how residents reconstructed expressions of urban identity in both cities. We found that China's unique official accountability system in local anti-epidemic practices led to stricter forms of top-down urban governance and that urban residents deployed forms of bottom-up agency in response. Our work provides a refined agenda for geographers and other social scientists to examine the interconnections among urban resilience, urban social responses to major public crises, and urban culture.