Study On The Cause Reasons Of Earthquake Rumor And Government Response Strategies In China

China is an earthquake-stricken frequently country in history. Since the2008Wenchuan earthquake, China has experienced several more serious earthquakes which bought huge economic losses and casualties. But, scientific earthquake prediction is still a worldwide problem. The great magnitude, severe injuries and non-prediction of earthquake remind people whatever the government or the public to strengthen the disaster warning system and improve the awareness of disaster prevention. Meanwhile, the devastating damages and the non-prediction of earthquake lead to the high likelihood of the earthquake rumors occurrence and spread. From2008to2010, over50earthquake rumors have occurred and spread in China which involved in more than40cities. On February20,2010, a rumor about "Shanxi will have an earthquake on February21" was crazy spreading via Internet and mobiles. It was reported that more than few millions of people which contained dozens of counties in Taiyuan, Lvliang, Jinzhong and Jincheng "wait for the earthquake in the street" until the announcement of quelling rumor was released by the Seismological Bureau of Shanxi Province.Scholars first studied rumors since World War II and has formed a relatively systematic theoretical results. Previous studies focused on the characteristics of rumor and individual differences of disseminators, summarized the definition of rumor; gave the explanation from the perspective of psychology and sociology; analyzed the spread models of rumor and gave the suggestions for government to quell rumor. In this paper, we use the Binary Logistic method and structure a couple of opposite samples that not only include areas with rumors but also include areas without rumors, which called "the earthquake sample". Through the comparison of these two sample groups, we generalize the determinants of the earthquake rumor’s occurrences from a brand new perspective connects with the social-economic factors, such as, economic level, education level, population density and so on.At this stage, our government’s ability to respond to the earthquake rumor has improved, which are mainly reflected in the government to shorten the time to quell rumor, the contents of quell rumor more scientific and the ways government choose to quell rumor are various. However, some disadvantages are existed during quelling rumor, such as:the lack of an early warning mechanism; the channels of quelling rumor chose by government are not reasonable; the long time interval between the appearance of rumor and quelling rumor. Finally, this paper separates the process of earthquake rumor’s dissemination into three stages and proposes some strategies according to life-cycle theory so that reduce the negative impact of earthquake rumors.