Confronting COVID-19: constructing and contesting legitimacy through the media in Chinese contexts

Introduction to the special issue

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the world to uncharted waters. Governments urgently need to figure out how to best handle the global health crisis and its impact on people's lives. As well as struggling to contain and manage the pandemic, they also face challenges in maintaining their legitimacy. The eight contributions in this special issue provide a much-needed snapshot of whether and if so, to what extent and how government legitimacy was constructed and contested through the media in Chinese contexts, including mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau, during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic between 2020 and 2021.

This article discusses government legitimacy and the role of the media to provide a conceptual and contextual framework for this special issue. It will start with a discussion about the relationship between government legitimacy, crisis and the media before addressing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on government legitimacy and the existing literature on this topic. This article will then explain the importance of focusing on Chinese contexts, followed by introducing each of the eight contributions.

Government legitimacy, crisis and the media

Legitimacy justifies the actions and authority of social groups and organisations and makes them acceptable to other social members. Likewise, government legitimacy legitimises the rule and policies of a government to be accepted by the public. Following the Weberian way of seeing legitimacy as a type of belief (Weber, 1947), some scholars (such as Useem & Useem, 1979) define government legitimacy as the prevalent public belief that government bodies and political authorities are worth supporting. It is about the public's trust in governments' capacity, accountability and reputation. Government legitimacy is thus related to citizens' perceptions of whether the functions of a political system or the actions or decisions of the authorities such as governments are acceptable and appropriate. These perceptions influence the extent to which citizens are willing and consent to obey the order from the authorities. In addition, government legitimacy is also about the justified basis of a government's claim to authority (Christensen et al., 2016; Roos & Lidström, 2014). Therefore the existence of government legitimacy is not only down to whether the people believe it to exist (Weber, 1947) but also how well it is justified and consented to (Beetham, 2013). Domestically, government legitimacy is thought to be the cornerstone of political stability (Chen et al., 1997; Useem & Useem, 1979). Internationally, government legitimacy is closely associated with and interdependent on the international recognition of a state or a government's right to rule (d'Aspremont, 2005). The inability to retain government legitimacy may result in political instability at home and beyond, and is thus not something a government wants to see.

For a government going through a crisis, its crisis management plays a crucial role in maintaining its legitimacy but may also be influenced by it. When a crisis strikes, essential values and normal functions in society are disturbed, threatened, or stopped by emergent events or diseases. Thus, urgent, remedying actions are needed (Rosenthal et al., 1989). High levels of government legitimacy can positively impact on how citizens perceive and respond to governments' decisions and actions to deal with a crisis. At the same time, the government's successful crisis management performance would also improve government legitimacy (Christensen et al., 2016). If the public is dissatisfied with government actions and policies dealing with the crisis and if there are public fears about the situation, the occurrence of a crisis potentially jeopardises government legitimacy. However, the successful handling of the crisis and public fears may increase citizens' satisfaction with the government's ability and even enhance government legitimacy.

In the face of challenges to their legitimacy during a crisis, governments would naturally endeavour to retain or strengthen it. In our networked society, the media, including traditional news media and online communication networks, are paramount and spread to all aspects of our social lives (Castells, 2007). The media is thus one of the essential instruments that would influence the extent to which governments can achieve their goal of maintaining or enhancing legitimacy. Media messages about a crisis and governments' crisis management would influence citizens' perception and evaluation of governments' ability to handle the crisis and government legitimacy. In the current digital age, apart from traditional news media, the Internet in general and, in particular, social media have become an alternative communication space. It is thus intriguing to understand how government legitimacy is constructed and contested through traditional news media and on the Internet during the public health crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic and government legitimacy: Challenges and opportunities

The COVID-19 pandemic has swept the world, provoking a great crisis of government legitimacy over their responses to or roles in the pandemic. As well as a public health crisis, the pandemic is also a social, economic and political crisis. A vast number of lives lost to COVID, an uncontrollable spread of the virus, repeated lockdowns, economic downturns, job losses, disruption to daily lives and unsuccessful vaccine schemes are among many other things that may challenge government legitimacy. The tricky situation makes communicating with the public about the pandemic crucial. And such communication happens in an environment that has been more complex than ever before.

For example, in the current communication environment, the widespread misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines facilitated by social media platforms' prevalence and technological affordances exacerbates the situation. The world has witnessed the proliferation of misinformation about the pandemic, the severity of which has led the World Health Organisation (WHO) to label the situation "infodemic" (WHO, 2021). Managing and soothing the public's fears amidst the pandemic (at least) requires accurate information sent to (and ideally properly understood by) public members. Yet, in the current digital communication environment, the production and dissemination of information are out of the control of either mainstream news media or governments. Misinformation poses a threat to government legitimacy as it may influence the public's perception of reality and fuel their fears in a way that undermines their trust in the ability of governments to contain the pandemic. Misinformation may also influence citizens' behaviour and mislead and prevent them from taking appropriate protection measures. The COVID-19 pandemic has thus brought about unprecedented challenges to governments' risk and legitimacy management at all levels and make media communication particularly important.

However, the pandemic may also offer opportunities for governments to improve their legitimacy. Governments are taking different approaches to pandemic control with various effects. During the earlier pandemic stages, countries such as the UK and the US, where governments were slow to impose lockdowns, saw enormous life losses. By contrast, other countries such as China, Australia and New Zealand that took a zero-COVID approach closed their borders but lost fewer lives to COVID. At the time, the justifications for government legitimacy were about containing the virus and saving lives. For those governments that were doing well in controlling the pandemic, the pandemic might open up opportunities - rather than bringing about challenges - to gain legitimacy due to their success in containing the pandemic and boosting the public's spirits. The 2020 landslide presidential election victory of Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand is an excellent example of this, as one contributing reason is believed to be her government's success in battling COVID-19 at the early stage of the pandemic. Given the centrality of the media in public life, the messages about the pandemic and related issues communicated through the media during these periods were crucial to turning the pandemic into opportunities for government legitimacy.

The existing, burgeoning literature has started to explore governments' crisis management, and legitimacy and the role played by the media in the process, particularly during the early stages of the pandemic. In India, for example, the state government used a range of tools to manage the crisis and the use of social media and mobile technologies became embedded into its everyday governance practices (Mali et al., 2021). During the (early stages of the) pandemic, the German, Swedish and UK governments lost public trust and suffered weakened government legitimacy, mainly caused by communication and transparency failures. Multiple and even conflicting voices included in media coverage resulted in public confusion (Hanson et al., 2021). In 2020, the Norwegian government convinced its citizens that it had sufficient resources to handle the crisis and controlled the pandemic well to boost its legitimacy (Christensen & Laegreid, 2020). In Singapore, where the pandemic was well controlled, effective political communications increased political trust and legitimacy (Woo, 2020). van Dijck and Alinejad analysed the role of social media in public debates between scientific experts, the Dutch government, journalists and citizens in the Netherlands. Their study reveals that the deployment of social media both damaged and improved public trust in scientific expertise during the (early stages of the) health crisis (van Dijck & Alinejad, 2020). In Vietnam, economic growth and low infection rates contributed to strengthening government legitimacy (Hartley et al., 2021). In the USA, communication failures, the prevalence of misinformation and the rise in COVID cases wrecked public trust in the government (Sauer et al., 2021).

The discussions in the existing literature suggest that governments have realised the urgency to maintain their legitimacy and tried to use communication tools to help them achieve this. However, governments' communication strategies and capacity to deal with the pandemic, media performances as well as interactions and dynamics between governments, scientific experts, media and citizens may influence whether and the extent to which government legitimacy can be maintained or damaged. It appears that countries such as Singapore, Vietnam and Norway that managed to control the pandemic witnessed a boost in government legitimacy during the early stages, with Singapore and Vietnam having authoritarian traits and tight media control and Norway a democratic country. By contrast, in democratic countries such as the UK, the US, Germany and Sweden that failed to manage the pandemic at the time, their government legitimacy declined. These discussions give rise to the following questions: 1) whether and if so, to what extent governments that have managed to keep the pandemic at bay can necessarily achieve enhanced legitimacy; 2) how (news/social) media communication can help governments deal with the challenges to their legitimacy in the process; and 3) to what extent political systems and media-politics relationships would make a difference.

The importance of the focus on chinese contexts

The focus on Chinese contexts offers a valuable lens to examine these questions for four reasons. The first is the involved Chinese societies' approaches to and roles in the pandemic. (Mainland) China is where the pandemic broke out and the first country that went into lockdowns. It has since taken a zero-case approach. Other Chinese societies such as Hong Kong and Taiwan have also adopted a zero-COVID policy. The success of Chinese societies, including mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau, contrasts the struggles and failures of the West in containing the virus. Internationally, however, China has been embroiled in disputes with other countries, particularly the United States (USA) and Australia, over the virus origin and handling.

The second reason is these Chinese societies' political variety and complexity. Mainland China is authoritarian and ruled by the Communist Party (CCP). As well as having different cultures and political systems, Taiwan, Macau, and Hong Kong have a long, intricate history with mainland China. Since the 1997 handover to China, Hong Kong has been "an autonomous Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, except in defence and foreign affairs."¹ Although governed under the "one country, two systems" principle, Hong Kong has seen the increasing interference of the Mainland over the recent years. Likewise, under the same concept, post-colonial Macau "has special administrative region status" and "is directly under the authority of the central government of China in Beijing"², despite its political system being different from the Mainland. By contrast, Taiwan has its multi-party democratic parliamentary political system, and there has been a perennial controversy about whether it is part of China or an independent political region. The pandemic has thus (re)raised long-lasting political issues surrounding these regions, exacerbating the challenges to the legitimacy of the governments involved.

Accompanying the differences in their political systems are the different media systems and media-politics relationships in these Chinese societies, and this is the third reason. Mainland China continues to have its propaganda framework, despite the commercialisation of news media. Taiwan and Hong Kong have highly commercialised media landscapes, with Macau having a combination of government-owned TV and radio stations, government-funded press and commercial news media. The hybrid media systems and relationships between news media and governments in these regions mean the research about them can provide helpful insights into how different media-politics relationships may influence contesting government legitimacy through the media.

The fourth reason is that the Internet has high levels of development in these Chinese contexts. By June 2021, mainland China had had over 100 million Internet users (CCTV., 2021). In 2019, 94.1% of households in Hong Kong had Internet access at home (Census & Statistics Department Hong Kong, 2020). In Taiwan, 83.9% of the population of above 12 years old had access to the Internet in 2020 (TWNIC., 2020). Likewise, Internet penetration reached 91% of the population in Macau in 2020 (Macao Association for Internet Research, 2020).

Because of these complexities in pandemic management in Chinese societies and political and media systems, the discussions about government legitimacy in these regions can offer new opportunities to understand the connections between government legitimacy, pandemic management and (news/social) media communication.

Contributions in this special issue

The eight articles and essays included in this special issue use research methods ranging from interviews to computational analysis to address the topic from different angles. The special issue begins with Cui Zhang Meadows, Lu Tang and Wenxue Zou's semantic network analysis of the communication strategies of three Chinese leading state-run news media – China Central Television (CCTV), the People's Daily and Xinhua News Agency on Sina Weibo during the early stages of the pandemic. Their analysis reveals that these state-run news media highly stressed the Chinese government's performance in curbing the pandemic in their social media messages to defend government legitimacy. Such an attempt received positive responses from Internet users. Compared with the SARS epidemic nearly twenty years ago, the messages conveyed by these state-run media achieved more transparency and openness about the situation. These messages' focus on government performance was a clever, communicative strategy to win public trust and strengthen government legitimacy.

Zhan Zhang's framing analysis of the coverage of SARS and the COVID-19 pandemic published by China Daily shows that the Chinese government remained the most prominent social actor in the coverage during both crises. Its role became even more central in the COVID-19 coverage. Zhang argues that the lack of information diversity and the overall positive tone about the pandemic amidst global suffering would not be helpful for the Chinese English news outlet to strike a resonance among international audiences and thus would harm its credibility.

Jingwen Qi, Stijn Joye and Sarah Van Leuven examined how the English coverage of China's mask diplomacy published by Europe-based news media became a contesting site. On this site, China's soft power promotion was resisted and perceived as an endeavour to compensate for the damages caused by the Chinese government's cover-up at the early pandemic stage and as a threat to the EU's solidarity and security.

Xi Luo and Hepeng Jia's article is based on a survey with Chinese citizens comprising 1000 valid national quota (representative) samples to understand the public's beliefs in COVID-19-related conspiracy theories (CCTs) and associating factors. Identifying three types of CCTs, they found that nationalism was positively associated with the respondents' beliefs in the CCTs that favoured China but was negatively associated with those CCTs that regarded "China as the culprit". The respondents' scientific literacy played a crucial role in refuting conspiracy theories. Yet, their trust in science did not always associate with beliefs in conspiracy theories, which were influenced by political factors. The association between public trust in media and that in conspiracy theories was affected by the nature of the news media, with those who preferred state-owned news media tending to believe the conspiracy theory on "the pandemic's foreign origin". By contrast, those who favoured critical, investigative news media had less strong beliefs in this theory.

Yi-Chieh Jessica Lin's article discusses the Taiwan government's attempt to maintain legitimacy through multimedia and an information campaign against fake news on COVID-19. Lin's study draws on an analysis of content ranging from news coverage to government websites and social media posts as well as interviews. Lin argues that the communication strategies of the Taiwan government played a successful, crucial role in managing the crisis, boosting public trust in government and combating the infodemic during the early stage of the pandemic. Among these strategies are mobilising positive sentiments, using humour, and adopting social media-friendly content such as memes and digital tools.

In his essay, Daniel Lemus-Delgado discusses the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)'s efforts to seek legitimacy in the international arena in the face of the threat of the pandemic to its political legitimacy. His discussion depicts how the CCP launched a Chinese media campaign at home and overseas to project China as the solution rather than the cause of the pandemic. It also portrays how the CCP constructed a discourse about the Chinese political system being superior to other (democratic) political systems in combating the pandemic.

Francis L.F. Lee provides a conceptual framework for evaluating whether effective pandemic control would benefit a government's legitimacy. He analysed the secondary survey data provided by the Hong Kong Public Opinion Research Institute (PORI) to discuss the experience of Hong Kong, which well supported his careful analysis of the conceptual model of pandemic situation's impact on the performance legitimacy of a government. Hong Kong's experience suggests that effective pandemic control may not necessarily lead to the public's positive evaluation of the government. In this case, citizens' evaluation of the Hong Kong government remained negative despite the improvement in the pandemic situation due to citizens' long-term profound political distrust of the government.

Gehao Zhang extends the concept of the media to logistical media, which refers to "media of orientation" that "order and arrange people and objects", such as "lighthouses, clocks, global positioning systems, temples, maps, calendars, telescopes, and highways" (Case, 2013: 379-380). In his study, logistical media include digital technologies and people, such as LCD screens, speakers, e-vouchers, the Macau health code and a COVID-19 prevention and control working group. He evaluates the effectiveness of three types of logistical media and their influence on government legitimacy in Macau. He argues that using these three types of logistical media helps to influence government legitimacy in this region in a complex and contradictory way that may not simply enhance or contest it.

Conclusion

The articles and essays in this special issue demonstrate that despite differences in political systems and media-politics relationships, the governments boosted their legitimacy using different communication measures and strategies in mainland China, Taiwan, and (partially in) Macau during the early stages of the pandemic. However, in Hong Kong, the success in controlling the pandemic did not enhance government legitimacy, as the long-existing political distrust dented trust in government legitimacy. In addition, China's endeavour to promote its legitimacy and superiority overseas might not be successful due to its relations with other countries in the world, international reputation and geopolitical dynamics. These discussions have an important implication. Although (news/social) media communication could help governments enhance their legitimacy in these Chinese societies during the early stages of the pandemic, their capability of doing so was limited by contextual factors. Prominent among these factors are citizens' (dis)trust in the government, news media, experts and politicians, the international reputation and perception of a country or region as well as geopolitical relationships.

Although focusing on the first two years of the pandemic, the collection in this special issue provides valuable insights into understanding the interplay between the politics of government legitimacy and (news/social) media communication during the crisis. The discussions offer useful case studies that allow readers to compare them with the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on government legitimacy in other social contexts from around the world. It also improves our knowledge of the roles played by the media and social factors in the politics of government legitimacy in times of crisis.

However, what these studies offer is a snapshot of the politics of legitimacy during the earlier stages of the pandemic between 2020 and 2021. In the later stages of the pandemic, particularly since the end of 2021, most countries that used to have the "zero-COVID approach" have changed their policies, with China as an exception. For example, New Zealand ended its "zero-COVID" policy in October 2021 (Frost, 2021). Since February 2022, the UK government has taken a "living with the virus" approach (GOV.UK., 2022). The justifications for government legitimacy have shifted from whether governments can contain the virus to what policies they have to manage and mitigate the impact of the pandemic on the economy and people's daily lives. It would thus be valuable for future research to examine how (news/social) media communication contributes to constructing and maintaining government legitimacy while the situations of the pandemic and relevant policies have changed after the first two years of the pandemic.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jingrong Tong

Jingrong Tong is Senior Lecturer in Digital News Cultures at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on the impact of digital technology on journalism, social media analysis and environmental communication. She is the author of Journalism in the Data Age and Data for Journalism: Between Transparency and Accountability.

Notes

1 https://www.gov.hk/en/about/govdirectory/govstructure.htm (accessed on December 17, 2021)

2 http://www.country-data.com/cgi-bin/query/r-8309.html (accessed on December 17, 2021)