The Meaning Making Of COVID-19 Management In China

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has posed a series of major challenges for the administration,and one of which is the adequate and responsive governmental response to public health crisis.In public crisis,the framing strategies chosen at the government’s press conferences aim to establish the acknowledgement of crisis reality in a conscious and proactive manner,and serve as an important communication channel with the public,thereby playing an important mediating role in the process of crisis management.During the prevention and management of the COVID-19 pandemic,the serial press conferences of the joint prevention and control mechanism of the state council play a key role in informing the public,public relationship management,guidance of risk perception and crisis communication.The present exploratory study used the grounded theory approach and text analysis to code and analyze the textual transcripts of 143 press conferences held in 2020.The purpose of this study is to investigate the government’s intentions and administrative logics of the meaning making in the crisis management based on the framing theory.On the grounds of the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic in China and the held government press conferences,the frameworks of crisis’s meaning making by the central government are summarized through the text coding and text analysis,which further subdivides the events into three different levels and different frameworks.The first level of the pandemic situation is the event itself,which was analyzed by the factual definition framework.The second level is the origin of the event,which was analyzed by the existing problem framework,causal explanation framework,and responsibility framework.The third level is government’s response and handling of incident,which was analyzed by the operational response framework,comprehensive safeguard framework,countermeasure recommendation framework,and international relationship framework.The analysis section focused on describing the characteristics of the application of each framework and trying to explain the impact factors behind the framing strategies.Combined with the Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication Model(CERC),this study further analyzes the key points of the framework application in different stages of the eruption,maintenance and recovery period,and makes a comparative analysis with the strategies in the CERC model.Subsequently,the preference and shortcomings of the Chinese government’s strategies selection were summarized in details.These eight frameworks were selectively constructed by the government based on the reality of the pandemic crisis,which fully reflect the current situation of the government’s meaning making of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis.It is beneficial to understand the attention preference of government meaning making more comprehensively and promote crisis communication and effective resolution of public health emergencies.Based on the findings of the above analysis,the following suggestions were put forward.First,accurately evaluate the crisis situation and comprehensively frame the crisis.The second is to emphasize on the use of the framework of meaning making in different stages,and to highlight the key points in combination with the crisis situation.Finally,we should pay attention to the multiple functions of meaning making and enhance its responsiveness and comprehensiveness.