Hi Suyeon, thank you for the comment! I would not generalise that “the Chinese government” is the sign maker in these cases, because these signs were sourced from the social media platform – Weibo, and based on clues in the images, they were most likely created by villages or local residential committees.
I think literacy is also a key issue here – the messages were perhaps purposefully curated to appeal to the fear of villagers so that they would be more likely to comply with the restrictions. Maybe this is an “effective” strategy to alert people with limited literacy? although the exclusionary ideologies implied wherein are not acceptable.

Thank you for this nuanced perspective! So signs regulate the space and are indexical of different levels of restrictions (and thus severity of the pandemic).

Thank you, Ross! So true about the need for unity; yet do difficult for humans to achieve …

Wow – sounds terrible to identify people like that. Like in the plague days when they put marks on inflected houses or even bricked them up.

Thank you, Jo! So many tragedies of families kept apart. How did humans ever invent nursing homes?!

The COVID-19 pandemic is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019. During the peak time of the pandemic, I was still in Viet Nam and I hardly ever went outside as my company allowed me to work from home. However, I did follow all the news about this pandemic through social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and current affairs every day. What impressed me the most was “thông điệp 5K” (the 5K rules) enacted by the Ministry of Health. Khẩu trang (face masks) – Khử khuẩn (disinfection) – Không tụ tập (no gathering) – Khai báo y tế (health declarations) – Khoảng cách (distancing) https://www.vietnamairport.vn/tuyhoaairport/vi/tin-tuc/tin-tuc-su-kien/thong-diep-5k were five things that I strongly believed all Vietnamese people remember whenever they mention about Covid-19. The message was conveyed effortlessly as all the rules start with the letter K and you could hear or read about them everywhere in Viet Nam. Besides, it was also interesting that Vietnamese artists even created the “5K dance” https://youtu.be/Lxkm8ifWB5g to spread out the message to more people in the community. The dance was soon becoming a trend that time and many people uploaded their videos doing this trend on Tiktok and Facebook.

It is no doubt that these rules have made a great contribution to reducing new coronavirus cases in Viet Nam. Thanks to following them, none of my family members had covid-19 during the pandemic.

Thanks, Minnie, for this important background information. To understand slogans – as any other text – we need to know the context.

Thank you for another positive example!

Thanks for providing this important piece of background information, Maya!

I lived in Vietnam during the peak time of Covid-19. Vietnam is located adjacent to China so Vietnam and China have a lot in common in using grassroots COVID-19-related signs to discourage their residents from going out and spreading the diseases. There is a popular slogan in Vietnam “Chịu khó cô đơn, cả nước mang ơn”, which means if you accept to stay lonely at home during Covid-19 pandemic, the whole country is grateful for you. This slogan underlines the seriousness of Covid – 19 and encourages people to follow the self – isolation rules in a positive way.

Generally, a written and signed document carries more weight and validity than spoken words because people can keep reading and thinking about it to see both the hidden and obvious meanings behind.