Professor King-wa Fu (University of Hong Kong)

Even as comments on China’s response to the unprecedent global public health challenge are mixed, the country’s local opinion polls so far (setting the possible preference falsification aside) suggest a positive view in general. State media is thought to have played a critical role in shaping the public’s understanding about the pandemic. This study seeks to explore the ways in which China state media communicated COVID-19 with the people, especially how the news media frames outbreaks in other countries, which offers a reference for the citizen’s social comparison to evaluate their own government’s performance. The study methodology is to collect China state media’s weibos in 2019 from the Weiboscope project and model the data by word embedding techniques. The findings are interpreted from two different angles: authoritarian media’s populistic style and its representation of the country’s foreign relation.