Framing the Crisis · Signature Work

My undergraduate Signature Work at Duke Kunshan University, submitted March 7, 2024 under Prof. Andrew Macdonald (Division of Social Science). Roommate Xingyu Shen helped with data collection and trimming.

Title: Framing the Crisis: A Study of Local vs. Central Media Propaganda During Shanghai COVID-19 Lockdown.

The question

When central and local state media cover the same crisis in the same language, how do their propaganda strategies differ, and is the relationship one of conflict or of coordination?

The corpus

• 1,161 articles across the April 1 to June 1, 2022 lockdown window
• Central: People's Daily (207) + Global Times (179), giving 386 articles
• Local: Jiefang Daily 解放日报 (316) + Xinmin Evening Post 新民晚报 (459), giving 775 articles
• A Python crawler against CNKI for People's Daily, Global Times, and Jiefang Daily, plus the Xinmin website; Python translation pass for analysis

The method

Two passes layered on each other:

1. LDA topic modeling (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) on the full corpus. A coherence-score sweep landed on k=9 topics for central and k=10 for local; top-20-word vectors per topic, which I then labeled.
2. Content analysis on a stratified sample of 76 articles (9 central + 67 local) drawn from the start, midpoint, and end of the lockdown, coded along four dimensions: source (officials / professionals / ordinary), nature (info-sharing / persuasion / narrative), tone (authoritative / suggestive / warm / sympathetic), and framing (struggle / resilience / government response / local response / economy / health).

What I found

The dominant dynamic between central and local media wasn't conflict. It was a stratified division of labor, two complementary halves of one apparatus:

• Central media ran what I'd call hard propaganda. Authoritative tone (56% against local's 24%). Government officials as the dominant source (67% against 25%). Information-sharing as the dominant nature (78% against 34%). Themes built around national cohesion, governmental capacity, and global leadership.
• Local media ran soft propaganda. Warm and sympathetic tone (61% warm against central's 11%). Ordinary people as the dominant source (51% against 11%). Narrative storytelling as the dominant form (55% against 11%). Themes built around community resilience, neighborhood logistics, and human-centric stories.

The most striking finding was temporal. In the hand-coded local-media sample from May 2022, at the peak of the lockdown, 91% of articles used a resilience frame. That wasn't an accident. As public morale buckled, the local apparatus pivoted hard into a survival and endurance narrative.

What I learned

That an authoritarian propaganda system isn't monolithic. It's stratified, with central and local arms running different scripts at different audiences, in coordination. The interesting question isn't whether they agree, since they do. It's how the labor of agreement gets divided.

The portfolio page summarizes the method and results. The underlying newspaper corpus is not redistributed here because the source articles remain copyrighted.