Political Drivers In China’s Environmental Communication

Since 1978, Chinese economy ushered in an era of unprecedented development under the policies of reform and opening up. At the same time, the natural ecology worsen sharply and China has paid a heavy price for the rapid growth of economy. In the face of the negative impact made by China’s environmental pollution and ecological damage to the economic and social development, the Chinese Communist Party(CCP) and our government began to realize the importance of environmental governance, and gradually rised ecological protection to the height of national strategy. Under the leading of the government, our environment communication build an inseparable contact with our national politics.Under the concept of political opportunity structure, this paper describes the political background of our environmental communication in three different period. And on this basis, the author takes haze, the most popular environmental crisis of China in latest years as a a typical example, analyzing how China Environment News frame its related environmental issues, and exploring the changes and the open process of political opportunity structure of environmental communication in our country, and further analyzing the political drivers in environmental communication, finally summing up the relation between environmental communication at the present stage in China and governmental legitimacy.