Navigating Digital Resilience: High-Skilled International Migrants’ WeChat Use During The 2022 COVID-19 Shanghai Lockdown

The enabling and constraining roles of social media in crises motivate a dynamic approach to examining digital resilience, inherent in the interplay between technological properties and enabling conditions. To expand the literature on how migrant groups navigate digital resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic, this study uses the concept of affordances as an analytical lens to examine how high-skilled international migrants in China used WeChat during the 2022 Shanghai lockdown. Through semi-structured interviews conducted in 2024, the study has identified three resilience capabilities enacted by participants to cope with the disruption: tactical negotiations of (in)visibility, active seeking for reliable information, and building localised communities through engaging with WeChat’s affordances, namely visibility, searchability, and association. This process reveals affordances as interactional and flexible, dependent on users’ agency in adaptation to real-life challenges. Emphasising the intercultural contexts, we understand digital resilience as intercultural learning and adaptation, negotiated across sociocultural environments and digital infrastructure. The findings call for fostering inclusive digital and intercultural conditions to enable more effective resilience responses to future crises.