Propaganda innovation and resilient governance: the case of China’s smog crisis

Crisis communication is essential to the political stability and legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), but how crises are managed in China is little understood. This paper aims to pursue this question through a case study of China’s smog crisis since 2013 – a regular recurring crisis that confronts the population and the Chinese government. The paper explores what innovative media strategies and practices have been deployed by the Chinese government to effectively guide public opinion and maintain social and political stability during smog crises. We first examine the smog coverage in People’s Daily to critique the propaganda and persuasion techniques in its modern crisis reporting. We then look at WeChat-based citizen journalism as alternative crisis communication to identify its popular themes and the CCP’s censorship tactics to manage it. We argue that the CCP’s propaganda during times of crisis has been mainly achieved through the revamping of official journalism on its state media and the differential censorship of citizen discourse on social media. The double-pronged approach ensures the public opinion is properly guided in crises and possible disruption to the regime’s stability is minimized.