National Distraction: Media Control during China's COVID Crisis

Abstract

Autocracies have long sought to control information, especially during crises. This paper examines how, after the end of China’s Zero-COVID policy, the Chinese government coordinated media strategies across state and commercialized outlets in the mainland and Hong Kong to mitigate damage to its legitimacy for a highly visible public policy failure. Using structural topic modeling, a quasi-experimental difference-in-differences empirical strategy, and large language model analysis, we identify significant shifts in topic distributions and framing of Zero-COVID following the policy change relative to our baseline media outlets – Hong Kong commercialized media. Specifically, we find a dramatic increase in non-COVID topics that coincide with China’s largest wave of cases and deaths during the pandemic across both Chinese-state aligned and mainland commercialized media. Moreover, we find a dramatic shift in how Chinese-state media cover Zero-COVID, evidencing a move away from depicting it as a COVID policy, instead associating it with non-COVID policies. Additionally, we conduct an event study for our difference-in-differences analysis, finding little evidence of pre-treatment trends, which lends support to a causal interpretation of our results. These findings underscore the importance of state control of media, as well as the openness of media environments. In times of crisis, autocracies can leverage their control of state outlets and ability to coerce private media under their review to distract from public policy failures and coordinate efforts to reframe policies in an effort to mitigate reputational harm.

Patrick J. Chester

Assistant Professor

Patrick Chester is an Assistant Professor of Quantitative Social Science at Stevens Institute of Technology. He received his PhD in Politics from New York University’s Politics Department.