Description
Since Xi Jinping amended China’s constitution in 2018 and effectively allowed himself to remain President for life, scholarly consensus suggests that the country has shifted from pragmatic authoritarianism towards a more assertive, centralised, and personalised mode of rule. This research examines the Chinese government’s political communication toward domestic audiences during major health crises. We built a database mapping official responses to pandemics from 2001 to 2023, collecting announcements from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Health Commission, and reports from both central and local state media. Using a mixed-method content analysis that combines manual coding and cluster analysis, we compare narrative patterns across different leaders and pandemic episodes.
We find that China’s official narratives have evolved from pragmatic reportage focused on crisis management and public health governance to ideologically charged discourse foregrounding national exceptionalism, self-praise, and criticisms of foreign countries’ governing capacity. Methodologically, the study offers a systematic, data-driven approach to tracing shifts in authoritarian communication. Conceptually, it invites new thinking about how authoritarian political communications evolve in response to global challenges and what this means for International Studies as it confronts the politics of crisis, legitimacy, and misinformation in an increasingly authoritarian world.
