Propagandization of Relative Gratification: How Chinese State Media Portray the International Pandemic

ABSTRACT While many previous studies have investigated propaganda in connection with misinformation, disinformation, or “fake news” campaigns, they have given insufficient attention to the political messages which are not squarely factually inaccurate but manipulated. This study identifies a political communication strategy, the propagandization of relative gratification, through which propaganda media 1) highlight global chaos to nudge the public’s downward comparison to a relatively stable domestic situation; 2) portray the nation’s adversaries as worse than its allies; and 3) leverages the public’s anti-foreign attitude. This study empirically examines Chinese state media’s approach to the coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic in 46 countries in 2020 by analyzing more than 3 million Chinese social media posts using the semantic similarity found in word embedding models. The results reveal that the global pandemic was depicted by the state media as generally more severe than China’s domestic situation. The more distant a foreign country’s relationship with China, the more severe its COVID-19 representation in China’s propaganda, deviating from the country’s actual epidemiological severity and what the Chinese general public thinks about it, indicating that a country’s relationship with China is an important predictor of how its COVID-19 severity was presented in China’s state media. This study extends the understanding of the sophisticated nature of propaganda in the current era.