During the time of COVID-19, China has employed several phrases to limit citizens outings to control the spread of the pandemic. Following the previously popular term 封城, which refers to “city-wide lockdown”, new wordings appeared starting from March, 2022, first as 静态管理, or “static management”, and then as 静默管理, or “silence management”. These phrases were widely used in regions across China before the the lifting of the lockdown in December 2022. The unclear meanings of these phrases became the center of arguments among Chinese netizens, who considered them to be “vague” and “uninterpretable”. 

            By examining the public posts to the vague policy terms from Chinese netizens on three major Chinese online media platforms (Zhihu, Baidu Tieba, and Xiaohongshu), I argue that vagueness of a term is not solely an inherent quality of its semantic expression or its pragmatic usage. Instead, vagueness can be discursively constructed by the audience for policy criticism or emotional complaints, as evidenced by the affective and evaluative stances taken by the public, and the "doublespeak" (Lutz, 1990) used to explain confusing policy phrases. Three social media platforms with different presenting forms and communities present public responses from various perspectives, and thus reveal different aspects of metapragmatic recognition of vagueness. From a linguistic ethnographic perspective, this study approaches vagueness in the case of Chinese term for COVID policies in terms of three layers: semantic vagueness, which is inherent in the expressions, situational vagueness resulting from different policy implementations in the same city or community, and vagueness as a critical metapragmatic frame that can be affectively and discursively constructed by listeners. From this perspective, vagueness is rather inherently a metapragmatic phenomenon, in the sense that it is only through a language user’s interpretation of an expression as vague that a sign can function as vague.