The paper aims to address the development of China’s narrative power during the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on world order. It argues that in the post-pandemic world, the emergence of the authoritarian sub-order would be prompted by China’s more proactive narrative power, given that the climate of opinion is ambiguous when faced with the uncertainty of the pandemic. (This does not imply the end of the existing liberal order; instead, it features the coexistence of both orders.) To understand how China’s narrative power has encouraged the emergence of the authoritarian sub-order to coexist in parallel with the dominant constitutional order, the article first reviews the existing literature concerning the changing world order. In this section, it also briefly defines and differentiates between the constitutional and authoritarian orders, what defines world order, and what distinguishes authoritarian from constitutional liberal order. Second it looks at the theoretical grounding. The nature, role and power of narratives are explored. Ideas about strategic narratives and the economics of attention are discussed. This theoretical background paves the way to examine China’s narrative power during a pandemic. Lastly, it switches to the Chinese perspective to address its support for the plurality of orders and its awareness of the strength of narrative in influencing dominant ideas. It looks at how China’s narrative power has been exercised from three perspectives (formation, projection and reception). Here, it mainly tackles how China has used its narrative power to spin the pandemic to its advantage in the reorganization of world order: improving its international image and advocating the authoritarian order as an alternative. China has been building its narrative along with its changing strategic diplomacy – from restrained and low-profile to proactive and assertive. In the conclusion, some reflections on China’s narrative power and the implications for world order are considered.

The dissociation energy of the ground state of NaH was determined by analyzing the observed near dissociation rovibrational levels. These levels were reached by stimulated emission pumping and fluorescence depletion spectroscopy. A total of 114 rovibrational levels in the ranges 9

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This paper thoroughly elucidates the relative intensities of the probe transmission in a ladder-type electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) system by considering the optical pumping effect. The observed EIT spectra reveal a different probe or coupling power dependence for various transmission peaks. In addition to causing quantum interference, the probe and coupling laser fields realign the population of Zeeman sublevels in the ground state through optical pumping. Analytical results indicate that the redistribution levels, failing to contribute to the EIT peaks, either out of transition path or zero transition probability, significantly affect the transmission intensity.

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