Public Relations Review xxx (xxxx) xxxx

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Public Relations Review

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pubrev

Online crisis communication in a post-truth Chinese society:

Evidence from interdisciplinary literature
⁎
Yang Chenga, , Chia-Jui Leeb
a
Department of Communication, North Carolina State University, Office: 222 Winston Hall, Raleigh, NC, United States
b
Department of Communication, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, United States

A R T IC LE I N F O ABS TRA CT

Keywords: Through a thematic content analysis of 118 journal articles from interdisciplinary fields, this
Social media study reviews the research trends of online crisis communication literature in a Chinese post-
Post-truth truth society, where objective facts play a diminishing role, and Chinese people are losing their
Misinformation trust, despite the best efforts of organizations to deal with fake news in crises. Results of this
Context
study disclose some unique crisis communication strategies (e.g., strategic distraction, rumor-
Crisis communication strategies
Trust
rebuttal, fabrication, acting cute, and content censorship) in crises of China. Influential con-
China textual factors such as the political system, cultural values, and media features are identified as
well. Theoretical and practical implications of this study are discussed, and a greater picture of
online crisis communication in contexts is posited for future research.

1. Introduction

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Weibo in the past decades have dramatically changed the field of crisis
communication. On the one hand, both organizations and their publics can interactively communicate on digital platforms and
depend on the new technological tools at any point and in everywhere (Westlund, 2013). On the other hand, a rise of crises occurred
because of disruptive effects of the post-truth era, when false or inaccurate information was quickly and widely spread on new media,
general public lost trust in institutions and organizations became more fragile than before (Chen & Cheng, 2019). To understand the
influence of social media on crisis communication, global scholars began to focus on this field. For instance, researchers (e.g., Austin,
Fraustino, Jin, & Liu, 2017) created a social-mediated crisis communication (SMCC) model to examine associations between orga-
nizations, social and traditional media, online and offline public, and word-of-mouth communication in crises. Besides this SMCC
framework, other theories such as media richness, uses and gratifications, and framing theories were adopted as well to study social
media types, messages, effects on publics in crisis communication (Utz, Schultz, & Glocka, 2013).
To extend the existing scholarship of global public relations and provide an up-to-date review research, this study pursued a
thematic review of the Chinese online crisis communication research published in 88 journals from 2006 to 2018, exploring the
research trends, contextual factors, crisis communication strategies (CCSs) adopted by different actors such as governments, NGOs,
and corporations in China. Driven by the fragmented and local social media platforms such as Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo, Renren,
and WeChat, the information transmission in China is becoming polarized and contentious (Chiu, Ip, & Silverman, 2012). In crisis
communication, misinformation and hoaxes were accelerating and affecting the way individuals interpret daily developments. China,
as an authoritarian society has developed new platforms and used artificial intelligence to identify and debunk rumor contents on

⁎
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: ycheng20@ncsu.edu (Y. Cheng).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2019.101826
Received 21 August 2018; Received in revised form 9 June 2019; Accepted 9 July 2019
0363-8111/ © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article as: Yang Cheng and Chia-Jui Lee, Public Relations Review, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2019.101826
Y. Cheng and C.-J. Lee Public Relations Review xxx (xxxx) xxxx

major microblogging sites (Perry, 2018). There appears to have been a big change in how individuals seek and share information in
crises and their perceptions toward governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and corporations may differ as well in
such a fragmented post-truth environment. Scholars continuously paid attention to the Chinese crisis communication (Huang, Wu, &
Cheng, 2016) and there is a need for a deep review of how previous research have studied online crisis communication in a post-truth
Chinese society.
In recent years, quite a few scholars (Cheng & Cameron, 2017; Cheng, 2018a; Rasmussen & Ihlen, 2017; Ruggiero & Vos, 2014;
Veil, Buehner, & Palenchar, 2011) began to conduct qualitative or quantitative reviews on the subject of social media and crisis
communication. For instance, Cheng (2018a) conducted a review study in the field of communication and summarized new social
media strategies such as stakeholder desired strategies, enhancing, and divergence strategies in crises. Rasmussen and Ihlen (2017)
found that a big proportion of social media users worldwide were under-represented and little attention was paid to effects of the
digital divide in current research. Cheng and Cameron (2017) reviewed 69 journal articles and suggested that more communication
research should focus on non-Western contexts. However, none of the above-mentioned articles could provide an updated and
interdisciplinary review of online crisis communication in China.
Consequently, this study intended to fill the gap and contribute to the theoretical advancement from the following three di-
mensions. First, this study aimed to extend the crisis communication research by adding unique CCSs employed by organizations
when the epistemic foundation of society becomes fragmented and uncertain in crises of China. Second, results would enrich global
public relations scholarship by presenting research trends and themes in a post-truth Chinese crisis context and make propositions for
future studies. Finally yet importantly, findings also benefited professionals by providing implications for crisis communication
practice on social media in China.

1.1. Post-truth and Chinese Crisis Communication

As the fastest diffusing technology in communication history, social media now has 3.5 billion active users in 2019, occupying
45% of the total population (Hootsuite, 2019). However, in this vast social media landscape with numerous users, misleading media
sources were amplifying and powering rumors and hoaxes without prudent editorial judgments, making fake news louder than truth.
The dismissal of truth and the lack of respect for others were evident in the U.S. elections and other parts of the world (Chen & Cheng,
2019).
In China, types of fake news such as rumors, hoaxes, and misinformation were also prominent on social media. More than 30,000
fake news were reported per day in 2016 alone and the WeChat platform has to block an average of 2.1 million false rumor posts daily
(South China Morning Post, 2017). Studies found that the Chinese citizens were losing their trust towards public institutions in
society including charitable and public health systems, and the public trust has reached the lowest level in the past years (Nie, Li,
Gillett, Tucker, & Kleinman, 2018; Wang & Yang, 2012). Sixty-six percent of Chinese consumers highly relied on recommendations
from friends or families, compared with 38% of those in the U.S. (Chiu et al., 2012). When “objective facts are less influential in
shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief,” according to the Oxford English dictionary (2016), a post-truth
circumstance occurs in China. Within such an era, worldwide scholars heatedly discussed how different types of organizations might
handle crises online in a post-truth Chinese society. Quantities of studies were published in a range of different disciplines such as
communication, business, and political science. However, the research trends, crisis communication strategies, and unique cultural
traits and political regime examined in the Chinese online crisis communication research remained unknown. This study thus pro-
posed the first research question to explore research trends such as methodological preference and analytical frameworks applied in
current scholarship.
RQ1: What were the research trends of the Chinese online crisis communication literature, in terms of numbers of publication per
year, theoretical frameworks, and methodological preferences?

1.2. Crises and Crisis Communication Strategies (CCSs)

In the past decades, a large body of academic research has discussed the risk, disaster, or crisis communication. Risk commu-
nication focuses on individuals’ risk knowledge, attitude, and behavior; disaster communication targets the communication between
government/non-governmental organizations, and the public following stages of pre-, trans-, and post-disaster. Crisis communication
in current literature is organizational and public relations oriented (Houston et al., 2015).
Scholars in crisis communication extensively discussed what a crisis is and what crisis communication strategies (CCSs) can be
applied to repair images of organizations (Benoit, 1997; Cheng, 2018a; Coombs, 2007, 2014). Earlier on, Sturges (1994) defined crisis
communication as a process and described three types of communication strategies, which included instructing, adjusting, and
internalizing information. In 1995, Benoit published the image repair theory (IRT) based on the symbolic approaches of ‘apologia’
and ‘accounts.’ He developed five main strategies such as denial, evasion of responsibility, reducing offensiveness, correction action,
and mortification to help organizations face attacks such as offensive acts and accusations of responsibility for the action (Benoit,
1997). Benoit’s IRT was widely applied in the crisis communication literature and scholars frequently applied it in descriptive
rhetorical case studies on individuals or organizations (e.g., Holdener & Kauffman, 2014; Kauffman, 2012). However, this theory did
not thoroughly examine the role of social media and how stakeholders might respond and react in a specific crisis remained unknown.
To explore the usage of CCSs in diversified crises situations, Coombs proposed the situational crisis communication theory (SCCT),
which developed the situation-oriented CCSs based on the attribution theory (Weiner, 2006). Regarding crisis as “a sudden and
unexpected event that threatens to disrupt an organization’s operations and poses both a financial and reputational threat” (Coombs,

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2015, p. 3), SCCT assumed that stakeholders made attributions about responsibilities of organizations in crises. Depending on the
different levels of responsibilities (i.e., minimum, low, and high), three types of crises situations might occur (i.e., victim, accident,
and preventable crises). Based on different scenarios, according to Coombs (2014), organizations should adopt appropriate CCSs to
respond, including attacking the accuser, denial, scapegoat, excuse, justification, remind, ingratiation, compensation, and apology,
which ranged from the least to the most accommodative level. The higher the level of stakeholders’ attributions of crisis responsi-
bilities to an organization might occur (Coombs, 2007), the more likely accommodative CCSs could be employed (e.g., compensation
or apology). The SCCT approach was widely discussed in the field of crisis communication (Cheng, 2018a). However, it did not fully
discuss the influence of media, especially the social media effects on crisis communication (Jin & Liu, 2010).
In sum, current crisis communication research was dominated by traditional theories such as IRT and SCCT and current frequently
used crisis communication strategies were originally developed from Western societies or contexts. Within such a post-truth cir-
cumstance in China, when organizations communicate with diversified, active, and large numbers of stakeholders through local
social media platforms, it is cruicial to identify their employed CCSs based on the traditional Western approach and explore possible
unique strategies utilized in the Chinese context as well. Thus, the second research question focuses on CCSs examined in the Chinese
online crisis communication research.
RQ2: What were the CCSs examined in the Chinese online crisis communication literature?

1.3. Contextual factors in Chinese Crisis Communication

This study defined contextual factors as “external factors that can be identified in the rhetorical arena and that exert impacts on
the attribution of crisis” (Zhao, Falkheimer, & Heide, 2017, p. 44) and focused on Chinese society, within which the unique cultural,
political, and media characteristics constituted three essential factors that might influence online crisis communication practice.
In China, contextual factors such as collectivistic cultures differed significantly from those in Western countries (Cheng, 2019). As
Hofstede (2001) suggested, a society with collectivistic cultures emphasized high-power distance, authority, other-face, and benefits
of the whole society. In contrast, individualism in Western societies valued low-power distance, equality, self-face, and self-priority.
For instance, face, as an idea originated in China (Gudykunst, 2004) referred to as “the positive social values each person effectively
claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact” (Goffman, 1967, p. 5). Each person might avoid
losing face or reputation of self and others, and meanwhile correct his/her own face by arguing against the adversaries (Goffman,
1967).
According to Ting-Toomey (1988), people in both collectivistic and individualistic cultures negotiated their faces. In specific, the
collectivism means that the value of culture emphasizes “the importance of the ‘We’ identity over the ‘I’ identity, in-group interests
over individual wants, and other-face concerns over self-face concerns” (Ting-Toomey, 1988, p. 213). Individualism means the value
of culture focuses on “the importance of the ‘I’ identity over the ‘we’ identity, individual rights over the group interests, and ego-
focused emotions over social focused emotions” (p. 213). So people from an individualistic country, such as the U.S. tend to consider
that self-face concerns (i.e., saving self-face when it is threatened in conflict situations) over other-face concerns (i.e., considering
other-face in conflict situations) and prefer face-restoration. Dominating and integrating styles are more accepted. On the contrary,
people from a collectivistic country such as China tend to believe that other-face concerns over self-face concerns. A face-giving
strategy is more adopted. Avoiding, obliging, and compromising styles are preferred. The power distance means the way a culture
deals with “status differences or social hierarchies” (Ting-Toomey, 1988, p. 220). People in small power distance prefer fewer status
differences and concern self-face while people in large power distance tend to concern other-face and comply with the stated
hierarchical roles.
Contrasting to the American political system, the Chinese political system is centrally- governed by the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP), whose power and influence dominates the education, military, media, and public systems, etc. for almost sixty years (Cheng,
2016). Besides the political system, the social media environment in China is vastly different from its counterpart in the West. First,
China as the world’s largest social media market contains 1.007 billion active users in 2019, which is more than triple of the number
of users in the United States and is approximately equivalent to the combined population of European countries such as France,
Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom (Chiu et al., 2012; Hootsuite, 2019). WeChat in China, for instance, a mobile-based social
media application has gained more than one billion active users by January 2018 (Tencent, 2018). Second, this large number of
Chinese users “stick” with social media platforms in crises. This country has the world largest population (1.42 billion) and 71 (1.007
billion) percent of them are active social media users in 2019 (Hootsuite, 2019), who averagely spend more than 40 percent of their
time on social media, and more than 80 percent of them registered multiple online accounts.
Third, social media in China is fragmented and localized. Initiated in 1994, the social media emerged in the mainland in forms of
forums and communities. In the past decades, China has successfully developed its own social media landscape without Facebook,
Twitter, and Instagram. Numbers of social media apps such as Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo, and WeChat with different purposes,
strengths, and geographic priorities have increased the complexity of Chinese social-media landscape (Chiu et al., 2012). For in-
stance, Sina Weibo launched in 2009 offers microblogging with multimedia. Location-based player Jiepang created in 2010 provides
services similar to Foursquare’s (Chiu et al., 2012). Consequently, the third research question explores influential contextual factors
or characteristics within current online crisis communication literature.
RQ3: What were the influential contextual factors examined within the Chinese online crisis communication literature?

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2. Method

2.1. Data collection

To address the above-mentioned research questions, we searched for peer-reviewed journal articles listed in the Web of Science
core collections, which indexed over twenty thousand academic journals in more than two hundred disciplines, and was widely used
by scholars for review studies (Cheng, 2019). The keyword screening method was applied in the online database and articles with
keywords such as “social media,” or “new media,” and any of “crisis,” or “crises,” or “incident,” and any of “Chinese,” or “China,” in
their topic sections were selected for review. Suitable 88 English language journals in interdisciplinary fields such as communication,
business, public health, political science, and management were confirmed, and 118 articles directly relevant to the online Chinese
crisis communication were added for final analysis.

2.2. Coding scheme and reliability tests

The methodology is best described as a thematic review, in that it includes a search of different qualified studies that deal with
common themes (Wei, 2009). Both deductive and indicative approaches of thematic analysis were performed on these articles.
Coding scheme includes five main categories: 1) research trends such as numbers of publication per year, theoretical frameworks, and
methodological preferences, 2) research focus such as media-, organizations-, or public-focused, 3) types of organizations such as
NGOs, governments, or corporations, 4) CCSs such as denial, attack, justification, and apology based on Coombs’ master list of
strategies (2014) and other mentioned strategies in the examined article, and 5) contextual factors such as cultural, political, media,
or other characteristics mentioned in the literature. Two coders were well trained and conducted the coding work. Twenty-five
percent of the 118 articles were collected for the inter-coder reliability check and sufficient reliability scores were achieved with the
Krippendorff’s alpha, ranging from 0.93 to 1.0.

3. Results

3.1. General trends

RQ1 asked about research trends of the Chinese online crisis communication literature. Among the 88 journals, Public Relations
Review, as the top-ranked public relations journal, served as the major outlet (13/118, 11%). These 118 articles were published from
2006 to 2018 (as shown in Fig. 1) and an upward trend on Chinese online crisis communication was found, with 12 articles (10%)
published from 2006 to 2010, forty articles (34%) published between 2011 and 2014, and 66 articles (56%) published from 2015 to
2018. Fifty-one percent (60 articles) were published in communication journals such as Public Relations Review, Journal of Con-
tingencies and Crisis Management, and Journal of Communication, and 49 percent (58 articles) published in non-communication journals
such as Vaccine, BMC Public Health, and Advances in Mechanical Engineering, based on categories of Web of Science. A vast number of
articles showed significant interests toward governments in crises (45/118, 38%), followed by stakeholders (37/118, 31%), cor-
porations (24/118, 20%), NGOs (8/118, 7%), and media/medium (4/118, 4%).
In terms of theories used, 44 out of 118 articles (37%) applied an analytical framework. These frameworks included major public
relations theories such as image repair theory, situational crisis communication theory, contingency theory of accommodation, and
social-mediated crisis communication model. Other communication or non-communication theories such as uses and gratifications,
media dependency theory, the spiral of silence theory, framing and priming theories, cyber, physics and society domains (CPS
Model), and self-organization theory were also applied.
Regarding methodological preferences, Table 1 indicated that qualitative methods were more prominent in current research,
including case study (23 articles, 19%), interview/focus group (14 articles, 12%), literature review (2 articles, 3%) and others such as
critical/discursive analysis (10 articles, 9%). Quantitative methods included content analysis (17 articles, 14%), survey (23 articles,

Fig. 1. Number of Articles in the Chinese Online Crisis Communication Research.

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Table 1
Methods Applied in Current Chinese Online Crisis Communication Research.
Research Methods No. of Articles in Communication Journals No. of Articles in Non-Communication Journals Total
(%) (%)

Quantitative methods 17(14%)

Survey 6(10%) 11(19%)
Content analysis 13(22%) 10(17%) 23(19%)
Experiment 2(3%) 3(5%) 5(4%)
Qualitative methods
Case study 15(25%) 8(14%) 23(19%)
Interview/focus group 3(5%) 11(19%) 14(12%)
Literature review 2(3%) 0(0%) 2(3%)
Others 7(12%) 3(5%) 10(9%)
Quantitative and qualitative mixed 12(20%) 12(21%) 24(20%)
Total 60(100%) 58(100%) 118(100%)

19%), and experiment (5 articles, 4%). Quantitative and qualitative mixed methods appeared in 12 articles (20%). Meanwhile, some
differences were observed between communication and non-communication journals (χ2 = 88.01, df = 4, p < .001): compared to
journal articles in other fields such as political science and public health, communication journal articles were found to have more
qualitative research (45% > 38%) and less quantitative research (35% < 41%).

3.2. Crisis Communication Strategies (CCSs)

RQ2 investigated the crisis communication strategies (CCSs) examined in the current literature. As presented in Table 2, both
traditional and unique Chinese CCSs identified from this review were included. These new CCSs within the Chinese context were
highlighted as they distinguished from previous strategies introduced by Western scholars (e.g., Benoit, 1997; Coombs, 2014). Results
also revealed that CCSs were adopted differently among types of organizations (e.g., governmental institutions, corporations, and
NGOs) in China.

3.2.1. Governmental CCSs

CCSs applied by major governmental institutions in China were following an asymmetrical crisis communication pattern with
their publics in crises. During several types of crises such as 2003 SARS health crisis, 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, and 2015 Tianjin
blasts, it was found that local governments directly used covering up strategy to hide the real number of victims at the incubation
period of crises (Bondes & Schucher, 2014; Cairns & Carlson, 2016; Tai & Sun, 2007). If in any situation, the crisis could not be
covered up and continued to erupt on social media, scholars found that Chinese governments, on the one hand, adopted defensive
strategies such as denial, attacking the accuser, and no comments/responses in crises (Chen et al., 2015; Hong, 2007; Lee, 2009) to
combat accusers, rumors, or misinformation on social media. On the other hand, they began to control information transmission by
applying rumor-rebuttal, content censorship, fabrication, and distraction strategies online. For instance, in the Shanghai fire incident
in 2010, when a large number of activists posted negative comments toward the local government. Governmental officials identified
certain posts as rumors, directly blocked undesirable microblog accounts, and arrested the director of the construction committee and
other relevant suspects as scapegoats (Tong & Lei, 2013). Zeng, Chan, and Fu (2017) found that when rumors in crises drew public
attention and brought threats to Chinese authorities, Weibo in China adopted both content censorship and rumor-rebuttal strategies

Table 2
Major CCSs in the Chinese Online Crisis Communication Research.
Governments Corporations NGOs

CCSs • Covering up* • Covering up* • Grassroots community organizing*

• Rumor-rebuttal* • Denial • Attacking the accusers
• Content censorship* • Acting cute* • Denial
• Fabrication* • Self-mocking* • Scapegoat
• Distraction* • Scapegoat • Justification
• Denial • Excuse • Apology
• Attacking the accuser • Justification • Correction
• No comments/responses • Correction
• Apology
Cultural elements • High-power distance • Face-giving • A closed culture of state-owned NGOs
• AAuthoritarian
closed culture of state-owned firms
Political factors • Authoritarian political system • Media manipulation
political system • Authoritarian political system
Media features • Media censorship • Media facilitation • Media censorship
• • Media mobilization
Note: * represents the unique Chinese crisis communication strategies (CCSs).

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to refute or delete comments.

Interestingly, King, Pan, and Margaret (2013) disclosed that the Chinese governmental institutions avoided arguing with skeptics
of their stakeholders. Instead, they fabricated social media posts by posting about 448 million comments per year including deceptive
information, rumors, or argument for the government’s side in political and policy debates. To significantly distract public attention
in crises such as Xinjiang riot in 2013, local governments even hired “50c party” members, who have been paid to distract public
attention from main issues of the crisis. These people pretended to be normal netizens, actively guided public opinions, and promoted
positive publicity on governments or the communist party (King et al., 2013). Furthermore, as time passed by and more moderate
comments were posted in the online sphere, crises themselves evolved to an end (Cairns & Carlson, 2016).

3.2.2. Corporate CCSs

Compared to governmental institutions, corporations in China employed a diversified range of CCSs such as covering up, denial,
self-mocking, scapegoat, excuse, justification, correction, and apology on social media (see Table 2). Results demonstrated that
private-owned corporations in China began to proactively handle crises by interactively communicating with consumers and fre-
quently using informal and nonverbal internet languages on social media (Kim, Zhang, & Zhang, 2016; Y. Wang, 2016). For instance,
when Jia Duobao (JDB), one of the leading brands of herbal tea in China lost its lawsuit with its competitor and had to face a brand
crisis online, this local company continuously applied strategies such as denial, bolstering, and scapegoating to remind consumers
that JDB was a victim of the unfair decision of the court (Y. Wang, 2016). Notably, JDB also successfully applied a new strategy
named as “acting cute” on social media to gain sympathy and public support by posting lovely pictures of babies with tears and
messages on its achievements under the guise of apology (Y. Wang, 2016). In the reputation crisis communication on social media
between China’s largest e-commerce company, Alibaba and its stakeholders, Kim et al. (2016) found that many nonverbal languages
such as emoticons and figurative language were well applied to implement the humorous self-mocking strategy.
In contrast, some state-owned corporations in China were still applying the covering up strategy to handle crises on social media
by deleting any negative publicity online. For instance, in the 2008 Sanlu milk contamination crisis, Veil and Yang (2012) found that
the local company tried to cover the quality problems of milk and infant formula, and even worked with China largest search engine
Baidu to delete rumors and any other negative media coverage on the internet. This milk scandal finally erupted in July 2008 when
sixteen babies were diagnosed with kidney stones in China and approximately 54,000 babies were hospitalized.

3.2.3. NGOs’ CCSs

In China, two types of NGOs exist: one is state-sponsored organizations such as the Red Cross of China, which directly or indirectly
receive funding support from governments (Cheng, 2016). The other type is grassroots organizations, which are self-supported and
receive donations, volunteers, or other sources of support from citizens and international NGOs (Lu, 2008).
Within current literature about CCSs applied on social media in China, distinguishable patterns existed between the above-
mentioned two types of NGOs. For state-sponsored organizations, defensive strategies such as attacking the accusers, denial, and
scapegoat were frequently applied (Cheng, 2016; Long, 2017). The Red Cross of China, for example, threatened to call the police to
arrest those who initiated sensational rumors on social media (Cheng, Huang, & Chan, 2017). Even if temporarily accommodative
strategies such as apology and correction were applied, the state-sponsored NGOs maintained their aggressive stances in crises in the
long term. Differently, grassroots NGOs in China (as shown in Table 2) were forming their unique communication strategies with the
empowerment of social media. For example, when facing widespread food safety scandals in China, activists in the alternative food
networks (AFN) applied grassroots community organizing strategies on social media by extending their reach, voicing dissent, and
developing alliances through personal connections with global food justice movements (Schumilas & Scott, 2016). Grassroots or-
ganizations were found to be acquainted with each other and built an increasing level of mutual trust in natural disasters (Peng,
2017).

3.3. Influential contextual factors in online crisis communication of China

Within the literature, the first identified cultural factor is high-power distance. Scholars found that in Chinese society, govern-
mental institutions have supreme authorities in their relationships with the public. When crises happened, the whole society was the
top priority and governments could apply any types of CCSs to control negative impacts and prevent the public panic (King et al.,
2013). They could either discourage or encourage unethical practices as well (Huang, Wu, & Cheng, 2016). For instance, in the 2011
Wenzhou train collision crisis, the Chinese government not only abandoned the rescue process in the golden time of crises, but also
destroyed the collided trains under soil (Bondes & Schucher, 2014). Consequently, because of the high-power distance, governmental
insinuations could easily maintain defensive stances in their communication with powerless individuals.
Second, the tradition of face giving also influenced CCSs significantly. Giving faces is the beginning of positive conversations,
while losing faces means ruining reputation or honor (Huang et al., 2016). Local corporations intended to maintain good relation-
ships with governments and avoided to threaten their faces in crises (Na, 2017). When facing the public, some private firms in China
applied different strategies to give faces to consumers and showed their care about public opinion in crises (Y. Wang, 2016). In
contrast, state-owned companies such as a big biopharmaceutical firm directly used covering up strategy to hide facts on the pro-
blematic vaccine and avoid losing faces. This company’s vaccination scandal broke out until a total of 17 infants died and were
associated with its products in 2013 (Chen et al., 2015).
The third major factor is the authoritarian political system in China. Because of the central power from the CCP, Chinese gov-
ernments frequently adopted unethical CCSs to cover up objective facts. Especially they manipulated facts in crises when the political

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regime was threatened (King et al., 2013). In current reviewed studies, although some scholar mentioned the degree of democracy
that online tools brought for political participation (e.g., Peng, 2017), still objective facts were highly controlled and governments
themselves even fabricated the media environment and distracted public attention by posting fake news or hiring other parties for
self-promotion (Zeng et al., 2017). Cairns and Carlson (2016) also found that Chinese governments frequently applied the content
censorship strategy, which might allow criticism or emotions “blow off” from the online public, but definitely stopped any political-
sensitive discussions that could generate collective actions that turn against governments. Under the support of CCP, the state-owned
NGOs such as Red Cross of China never disclosed donation information transparently; instead, they found the third party, a 23-year
old girl as the scapegoat and claimed themselves as victims in crises (Cheng, 2016).
Last but not least, social media in crises of China is double-edged. On the one hand, it has to serve for or obey political interests,
through promoting and legitimating policies of the CCP (Zeng et al., 2017). Since the year of 2012, central and local governments
have set up their own social media accounts and tightened the control of online Chinese sphere (King et al., 2013; Tong & Lei, 2013).
Governments applied media censorship, distraction and fabrication strategies to manipulate media coverage and influence public
opinion. On the other hand, grassroots NGOs’ activities were empowered on social media when they magnified their voices, expanded
the reach, and persuaded others to join activities that promoted social activism. Internet users in China also highly engaged in crisis
crowdsourcing activities and these “new forms of web-based citizen collective actions focusing on disaster information management”
(Peng, 2017, p. 328), for instance, in the Wenchuan earthquake have strongly encouraged ordinary citizens to engage in natural
disaster responses.

4. Discussion and conclusion

Through a thematic review of 118 articles from 88 journals in interdisciplinary fields, this study presented research trends of
Chinese online crisis communication literature. Results indicated that increased academic attention had been paid to the Chinese
online crisis communication and more than half of relevant articles appeared in journals in the field of communication. Many scholars
showed the highest interests toward governments in crises, followed by stakeholders, corporations, NGOs, and media/medium.
Diversified theoretical approaches were adopted and more qualitative research methods appeared in communication journal articles
than those in other fields such as political science and public health. Data also indicated that in the context of a post-truth Chinese
society, some unique crisis communication strategies (e.g., strategic distraction, rumor-rebuttal, fabrication, acting cute, and content
censorship) appeared and differed from traditional CCSs introduced from Western theories such as IRT and SCCT. Influential con-
textual factors such as the political system, cultural values, and media features were identified as well. Theoretical and practical
implications and a greater picture of the contextual online crisis communication model (i.e., COCC) are proposed below.
First, this study enhanced the global public relations scholarship by suggesting three contextual factors such as cultural traits,
political regime, and media features that might influence crisis communication strategies adopted by organizations in crises.
According to Zhao et al. (2017), the traditional crisis communication research following a functionalistic paradigm has been chal-
lenged. With the popularity of social media all over the world, it is difficult to adopt a linear planning model, treat participants as
objective objectives, and continue focusing on the information transmission between organizations and their publics (Coombs, 2014).
Instead, scholars emphasized a social constructionist approach and suggested that crisis communication must consider contextual
factors to become meaningful (Falkheimer & Heide, 2010; Zhao et al., 2017). This study thus responds to the call for an evolution of
crisis communication research and posits the COCC model (as shown in Fig. 2) for future research.
The COCC model defines crisis communication as a form of strategic communication in contexts and assumes that the strategic
goal and organizational behavior should be determined by the specific context that they stay within (Zhao et al., 2017). In a post-
truth society of China, for instance, governmental institutions applied dominant and defensive strategies toward their publics under
the political support from the communist party and controlled media system. Organizations and their publics followed the col-
lectivistic cultural traits during their crisis communication online. In contrast, media in Western countries such as the U.S., under the
ideology of liberalism and the support of a democratic political system served as watchdogs of governmental institutions (Duan &

Fig. 2. A Big Picture of Contextual Online Crisis Communication (COCC) Model.

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Takahashi, 2016). People actively defended for themselves in their conversations with organizations on social media. Consequently,
the COCC model posits the first theoretical proposition: Contextual factors such as cultural elements, political factors, and media features
would influence the adopted strategies in online crisis communication. The more (fewer) collectivistic cultural elements, authoritarian
political factors, and censored media features that the context contain, the more (less) likely dominant organizations such as gov-
ernments in crises within the context would adopt defensive communication strategies.
Second, this study enriched the crisis communication literature by identifying unique CCSs and presenting an unsymmetrical
crisis communication pattern within a post-truth Chinese society. As this updated review disclosed, organizations in China adopted
unique CCSs in crises, which included strategic distraction, rumor-rebuttal, fabrication, acting cute, and content censorship, and so
on. When objective facts played a diminishing role in a post-truth society, Chinese governments rather than combating fake news in
crises were creating fake facts to manipulate public opinion and maintain their political control of citizens (King et al., 2013; Tong &
Lei, 2013). Private-owned companies relied on different strategies such as “acting cute” to work on the sympathies of their publics
and meanwhile maintained a good relationship with governments by giving faces to them. Future studies may examine both tra-
ditional and new CCSs summarized from this study.
Third, current literature presented varieties of measurements of CCSs such as frequency and volume of public responses on social
media, tonality of public responses, amount and sentiment of media coverage, public trust, corporate reputation, and stock price of
corporations (Chen et al., 2015; Cheng, 2016; Ngai & Jin, 2016; X. Wang, 2016; Zheng, Liu, & Davison, 2018). In the past literature
on public relations, scholars frequently applied media publicity, organization-public relationships (OPRs), and organizational re-
putation (e.g., Liu, Jin, Briones, & Kuch, 2012; Luo & Zhai, 2017; X. Wang, 2016; Zheng et al., 2018) as the outcome evaluation of
communication activities. Particularly in the field of crisis communication, media publicity was one of the most useful items to
measure the CCSs effectiveness on social media (Liu et al., 2012; Utz et al., 2013; Wu & Yeh, 2012). The COCC model thus lists
different online crisis communication outcomes and posits the second theoretical proposition: online crisis communication strategies
would influence organization-online influencer relationships, online influencer-follower relationships, image construction, business value, or
media publicity of organizations.
Furthermore, more quantitative studies can focus on social media influencers. In a post-truth crises circumstance, when the public
losses full trust toward formal institutions and authorities, the role of social media influencers becomes significant in the commu-
nication with their followers. Jiang, Huang, Wu, Choy, and Lin (2015) found that some Weibo posters could generate more “likes”
than organizational strategies, thereby proving themselves more influential in crises. As the current Chinese online crisis commu-
nication literature is still dominated by qualitative research, future agenda can employ more quantifiable items to measure impact of
social media influencers in crisis communication.
Finally yet importantly, this study also provides practical implications for crisis managers who are interested in the commu-
nication practice in China. Results first showed that in a low-trust society of China, individuals highly depended on social media
rather than traditional media (Lyu, 2012). When multiple functions of social media provided amenities for the people, large numbers
of Chinese Internet users enjoyed the connections with friends and families and relied on posts from them as major news outlets.
Thus, it would be effective to focus on word-of-mouth communication in crises. Second, among all the dimensions of organization-
public relationships, trust has been studied as a key measurement tool of crisis communication effectiveness and trust is dynamically
changing (Cheng, 2018b; Cheng, Shen, & Jiang, 2019), so it would be useful to longitudinally monitor public trust when organi-
zations adopt CCSs accordingly. For international business in China particularly, strategies such as self-mocking and acting cute were
recommended and informal and personal internet languages could help open dialogue with publics in the corporate crisis commu-
nication (Kim et al., 2016; Y. Wang, 2016). Accommodative strategies might not be effective when publics’ anger exploded on social
media (Cheng, 2016); denial of responsibility on a legal basis at the very beginning of crises was also ineffective and might trigger
strong sentimental feelings from consumers (Yang & Jiang, 2015). Instead, in the Chinese online crisis communication, an integrated
use of accommodative and defensive CCSs prevented escalation of a corporate crisis (Ngai & Jin, 2016).
In conclusion, this study strengthened our understanding of online crisis communication in a post-truth Chinese society. Different
from post-truth discussed in the West, facts become generally in short supply, especially in Chinese crisis situations. Organizations
such as governments applied unique CCSs such as fabrication and distraction strategies to construct a “pseudo-truth” in purposes of
political control and stabilization of stirring times in crises. Publics, driven by hopes and emotions over rationality, chose to depend
on social media to seek and share information that reinforced their existing believes (Cairns & Carlson, 2016; Lyu, 2012), which in
return triggered more public discussion of refuted topics and decreased publics’ trust toward public institutions in crises. Conse-
quently, there was no formal standard of facts in crises of China. The interactive and dialogic nature of social media, on the one hand,
offered power for grassroots organizations and increased the level of civic participation in China (Peng, 2017; Xie, Qiao, Shao, &
Chen, 2016), on the other hand, have become effective platforms for crises control and truth manipulation.

5. Limitations

This study extends what is known about crisis communication initiated from Western countries and suggests how these results
may change our broader theoretical understanding of strategies, evaluation, and post-truth circumstances. Although this research
contains important implications, several limitations must be stated here. First, this research is based on secondary data from updated
literature. The purpose of this study is to fill the gap of global public relations research by exploring the research trends, CCSs, and
contextual factors of Chinese online crisis communication research, and make propositions for future research. Future studies may
consider applying the COCC model in primary research and explore the relationships between contextual factors, crisis commu-
nication strategies and effectiveness in a post-truth environment. Second, as fake news contain different types such as rumors, frauds,

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and hoaxes. Future studies can review or examine how types of fake news may influence crisis communication strategies and ef-
fectiveness.

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Dr. Yang Cheng, Ph.D., MBA, is an Assistant Professor in the department of Communication, North Carolina State University. She teaches quantitative research
methods, strategic communication, the introduction of public relations, and global communication in the U.S. and Hong Kong. Her research interests include re-
lationship management, digital media and crisis communication, and AI-powered tools in business and health communication. Some of her publications have appeared
in top journals such as the New media & Society, American Behavioral Scientist, Journal of Product & Brand Management, International Journal of Communication, Public
Relations Review, and Asian Journal of Communication. She has also received many awards and honors from global institutions such as the Institute of Public Relations
and PRIME research, and has acted as the principal investigator in many grants including the Arthur Page Johnson Legacy Scholar Grant.

Chia-Jui Lee is a graduate student from North Carolina State University.

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