How the Authoritarian Government Delivers Messages Through Social Media During the COVID-19 Crisis Público
Cheng, Xinyan (Spring 2021)
Published
Abstract
During times of public crises, governments must act swiftly to deliver crisis messages effectively to the public; failure to do so will undermine government approval and regime legitimacy. What kind of content does an authoritarian country like to communicate with citizens during a crisis? What are the effects of its strategic messaging behavior? This thesis systematically investigates the Chinese government’s communication approaches during the COVID-19 pandemic. It argues that when the domestic crisis is severe, the government will use the international benchmarking strategy to mitigate public discontent of the regime by issuing more negative information about foreign governments. Additionally, this study argues that negative reporting on foreign governments will promote a higher level of citizen engagement than positive information about foreign governments. The thesis uses data from the official account of People’s Daily – the most authoritative newspaper in China – on Sina Weibo – the most popular microblogging portal in China. By collecting and hand-coding 9,824 social media posts of People’s Daily, this study finds that when the government performance looks worse, the proportion of negative foreign information increases, but the result is not statistically significant. Surprisingly, the findings show that citizens engage more actively with positive international information rather than negative one. While this paper does not lend substantial support to the international benchmarking theory, these results contribute considerably to political communication and international knowledge in authoritarian regimes as well as shed new light on the authoritarian government’s ability to influence public opinion through social media.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Background on the Development of Social Media in China 6
Literature Review 9
Strategies for Authoritarian Governments to Manage Public Opinion 9
Theoretical Framework 13
Manipulating the Beliefs of Government Performance 13
Citizen Engagement With the International Benchmarking Strategy 16
Data: Posts From People’s Daily 20
Posts in General 20
Posts About Covid-19 24
Testing H1: the Government’s Strategy 32
Model 32
Variables 32
Results for H1 42
Testing H2: Citizen Engagement 44
Model 44
Variables 45
Results for H2 49
Robustness Checks and Alternative Explanations 50
Additional Observations 55
Discussion 57
Future Research 60
Conclusion 62
Appendix (I) Social Media Posts Not About COVID-19 66
Appendix (II) Word Cloud of Weibo Posts About Foreign Governments 67
References 69
About this Honors Thesis
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