Healthcare and Political Slogans: An Analysis of Chinese Government Communication during Healthcare Emergencies

When talking about the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), its long history of issuing slogans, kouhao 口号, has always been associated with the intent of mobilizing the people (Xia 2009: 109). Along with other forms of official communication, red banners have been a stable presence in Chinese cities for decades, as part of government campaigns of various nature, among which there is healthcare especially in the event of epidemics and other healthcare crises (Wishnick 2010). More specifically, said slogans are composed of simple and concise statements with the aim of creating precise shared civic values and actions (Kim 2011). Taking into account the nature of those kouhao 口号within the framework of official CCP-issued healthcare communication, this study will examine a corpus of Chinese red banner slogans released during major healthcare crises that have hit the country over the past decades, namely, avian influenza, SARS, and COVID-19. As data-collection has been severely limited, all corpus entries have been gathered through the Internet, i.e. popular Chinese websites. A first part of the project will encompass a description of the main rhetoric and textual characteristics of those slogans by means of word frequency and collocation analysis, both synchronically and diachronically. This will be followed by a more in-depth study of the functions of healthcare-related slogans in China, especially during disease outbreaks. Here, it is important to consider Chinese official communication in a way that takes into account its specific context and features (Huang 2010), as well as the language used to convey certain messages. For this purpose, it will be vital to employ the tools of Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough and Fairclough 2012), with the specific aim of extrapolating a case-specific theory that can be used to explain the social and political phenomenon of red banner slogans during times of healthcare crisis. This is especially poignant as Chinese official communication tends to be rater ideologically charged, and CDA would be the ideal medium to expose those communication strategies that appear neutral but may actually seek to shape the representation of events in specific ways (Machin and Mayr 2012). References Bandurski, D. 2020. “An Outbreak of Slogans”. 中国传媒研究计划 (CMP). Published on January 29, 2020, https://chinamediaproject.org/2020/01/29/an-outbreak-of-slogans/ (consulted on January 31, 2021). Huang, Y. H. 2010. “Theorizing Chinese communication research: a holistic framework for comparative studies”. Chinese Journal of Communication, 3, 1: 95-113. Kim, T. S. 2011. “Three Faces of Chinese Modernity: Nationalism, Globalization, and Science”. Social Semiotics, 21, 5: 683-697. Machin, D. and Mayr, A. 2012. How to do critical discourse analysis. Sage: London. Song, J. and Gee, J. P 2019. “Slogans with Chinese characteristics: The political functions of a discourse form”. Discourse & Society, 31, 2: 201-217. Xia, N. X. 2009. “Political Slogans and Logic”. Diogenes, 221: 109-116