From Zero-COVID to Global Alignment: Transnational Pressures and China’s Pandemic Communication Transformation

The COVID-19 pandemic radically reshaped global communication dynamics, compelling governments to deliver frequent updates on infection rates, public health protocols, and evolving scientific knowledge. This study examines how the Chinese government, through its official press conferences, established and maintained specific frames during the COVID-19 pandemic across four distinct phases from 2020 to 2023. Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling on 154 press conference transcripts, we identified seven distinct communication frames. The analysis reveals a sophisticated cyclical frame reinforcement model that challenges traditional linear crisis communication theories, demonstrating how authoritarian communication systems can strategically reactivate previously effective frames for new policy objectives. The study contributes to crisis communication theory by identifying semantic governance as a distinctive mechanism for maintaining regime legitimacy during major policy transitions, enabling governments to transform policy reversals into adaptive evolution through strategic linguistic engineering.