Unpacking government social media messaging strategies during the COVID‐19 pandemic in China

Abstract

A core aspect of agile governance is effectively managing communications between a government and its citizens. However, doing so during an emergencyparticularly a pandemic-is often complex and challenging. In this article, we examine how various levels of the Chinese government (central, provincial, and municipal) communicated with the public in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Analyzing government social media posts during the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan ("text as data"), we conduct topic modeling analysis and identify four strategies that characterize Chinese governments' responses to a variety of issues at the ground level, which we label instructing information, adjusting information, advocacy, and bolstering. The results show that local government agencies predominantly used the first two strategies, whereas the central government mainly relied on the last two. These strategies explain how various levels of government engaged in agile governance through their communication with citizens, highlight the coordination and control work undertaken by governments at all levels, and demonstrate how these methods shielded the central government from blame for the pandemic.

Improving the Communication and Credibility of Government Media in Response to Public Health Emergencies: Analysis of Tweets From the WeChat Official Accounts of 10 Chinese Health Commissioners

“…State-owned media can also speak out on behalf of the government and analyze stateowned media's Sina Weibo posts to build a method for averting public health problems (13). We can enhance the effectiveness of government-population communication and regulation of public health events by analyzing Chinese government social media posts during the COVID-19 pandemic to prevent public blame (14). Governments can use social media to affect public behavior in various ways.…”

Deny or bolster? A comparative study of crisis communication strategies between Trump and Cuomo in COVID-19

“…First, since SCCT has not been extensively utilized to investigate health crises (e.g., Kim & Liu, 2012 ; Li et al, 2021 ; Liu et al, 2018 ), the study proffers novel findings on to what extent SCCT applies to an unprecedented pandemic, constituted by many internal and external factors and challenges. It conforms to the contention made by Coombs et al (2020) on the potential applicability of SCCT in investigating “sticky crises,” which involves external contextual factors: digital environment, misinformation, and paracrises like political, racial, and social issues.…”

“…With a focus on the media content, a strand of empirical studies examined how politicians and government agencies responded to crises to enhance their political goals from the PR perspective ( Benoit, 2006 , Chen et al, 2020 , Garnett and Kouzmin, 2007 , Jong, 2017 , Li et al, 2021 , Liu, 2008 , Liu et al, 2018 ;). For example, George W. Bush faced a constant barrage of attacks and criticism amid his 2004 re-election campaign.…”

“…They observed that multiple strategies emerged under the framework of SCCT, with instructing information strategy predominantly employed before and during the disaster and adjusting information about corrective action and bolstering strategies more utilized in the post-crisis phase, which points to the longitudinal characteristic of strategies in accordance with the crisis evolvement. Similarly, a recent study by Li et al (2021) drew upon SCCT and conducted a topical modeling analysis of Weibo posts about COVID-19 crisis messaging from the Chinese government. Results displayed that while the Wuhan local government agencies primarily adopted instructing and adjusting information, the central government endorsed using advocacy and bolstering.…”

“…SCCT contends that to resolve the reputational threat, crisis managers should tailor their strategies to the level of the crisis responsibility perceived by the relevant public(s) and account for past crises history. Further, although SCCT has been adopted in the context of COVID-19 to examine Norwegian (Christensen & Lægreid, 2019) and Chinese ( Li, Chandra, & Fan, 2021 ) governments’ messaging on social media, scant attention has been dedicated to investigating U.S. politicians’ crisis response strategies during the pandemic, reinforcing the novelty and importance of this study. From this perspective, we contribute to the SCCT literature by (1) exploring it in a single yet lengthy crisis with multifaceted challenges, (2) extending it to the digital information ecosystem, and (3) applying it to U.S. political crisis communication.…”