Vaccine Nationalism: How China's State Media misinform about Western vaccines and highlight the successes of Chinese vaccines to different audiences

Abstract

What motivates state-sponsored vaccine misinformation campaigns, given clear scientific evidence of vaccines' efficacy? We explore this issue through the lens of state-owned presses published in mainland China and in Hong Kong. We first collect an original database of media reports on both Western and Chinese vaccines from 16 Chinese-language media publications based in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. We find that the quantity of coverage of Western vaccines by mainland state-owned media outlets to be much less than their coverage of Chinese vaccines, reflecting the unavailability of Western vaccines in mainland China. However, applying a dictionary-based sentiment analysis, we find that state-owned presses in mainland China still portrayed Western vaccines negatively. In Hong Kong, where there is direct competition between Chinese and Western vaccines, we find that state-owned presses gave high coverage of Western and Chinese vaccines but greater negative coverage of Western vaccines. These findings are consistent with a Chinese ``vaccine nationalism" policy designed to nurture the domestic biotechnology sector.

Patrick J. Chester

Assistant Professor

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