Governing Information in Crisis: Communication Governance in China from Wenchuan to COVID-19

Abstract

This thesis examines how the Chinese Party state governs information during crisis, comparing the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake with the COVID 19 pandemic of 2020 to 2022. It argues that information management is not a policing function added to Chinese rule but one of its constitutive instruments: the Party governs through the organisation of circulation, deciding what becomes visible, when, how it is interpreted, and which emotions it should produce. The study identifies a shared grammar of crisis governance, from local suppression and managed disclosure to narrative reframing and the containment of residual criticism. It shows that the specificity of the Xi era lies not in inventing new techniques but in centralising, legally codifying, and technologically integrating older ones, while framing information as a matter of national security. Yet the regime remains adaptive rather than omnipotent: as the rise of content generated by users transforms citizens from audiences into producers, the same narratives that sustain legitimacy can become liabilities, as the abrupt reversal of the zero COVID policy in 2022 revealed.