Narrating the Pandemic: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Chinese Official Media and Cultural Framing in COVID-19 Coverage

<p dir="ltr">COVID-19 posed an unprecedented challenge to the world, requiring a swift government response and extensive public information campaigns to manage public perceptions and slow the spread of the virus. In China, official media platforms such as the People's Daily, Xinhua News Agency, China Central Television (CCTV) and Healthy China served as key channels for disseminating health information, promoting preventive measures, and shaping public discourse. These platforms played a crucial role in providing updates about COVID-19, emphasizing national unity, social stability, and collective responsibility. This study examines how Chinese official media portrayed the COVID-19 epidemic, drawing on Entman’s (1993) framing theory and corpus analysis to explore how cultural values were embedded in official discourse. By utilizing corpus linguistics methods, this research offers a systematic approach to identifying linguistic patterns that reflect dominant media frames. Through an analysis of keyword frequency, concordance, and collocations in a large dataset of Weibo posts from official accounts, the study provides new insights into crisis communication strategies in structured media environments. The findings contribute to framing theory and cultural studies by situating media narratives within the Chinese cultural context, offering a perspective on how official media influences public perceptions during crises. The key findings reveal that Chinese media employed framing strategies that aligned with cultural values such as Confucianism, high-power distance, uncertainty avoidance, collectivism, long-term orientation and face-saving. By using frames such as problem definition, causal interpretation, consequences, treatment/recommendations, human interest, conflict and medical experts, media narratives reinforced social cohesion, encouraged public cooperation, and contributed to managing China's global image during the pandemic.</p>