抄録
This paper examines the implications of One World: Together at Home, an 8-hour virtual benefit concert organized by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the international advocacy organization Global Citizen on April 18, 2020, for shaping narratives surrounding a global emergency. It analyzes how One World was intended by the WHO and relevant social actors to retain their discursive positions and symbolic power in guiding the discourses against the pandemic at its onset. It starts by reviewing the scholarship on critical event management and media events, establishing the theoretical framework for the empirical analysis of the virtual concert. It then examines the production and delivery of One World, explaining how the WHO, major American television networks, celebrities and digital platforms are involved in constructing a US-centric “mediated center” in the global discussions of the handling of COVID-19. As examples illustrating how the meanings of One World were appropriated beyond the English-speaking, US-focused context, this study then investigates how the agendas of One World was perceived in China and Taiwan, respectively. By focusing on the geopolitical complexities surrounding Taiwan and China, particularly Taiwan’s struggle to obtain the WHO membership and China’s internet censorship, this paper explains how and why, as a form of symbolic power, One World in practice triggered a sense of exclusion from the version of “one” world it sought to construct in both Taiwan and China for very different reasons. It also reveals the implications of One World for the ongoing geopolitical tensions in the global healthcare discussions.
