Reading Shanghai's lockdown through four newspapers

The most striking number in my undergraduate thesis is 91%. That's the share of local-Shanghai-paper coverage that, in May 2022 — the peak month of the city's COVID lockdown — was framed around the word resilience.

This is an informal companion to my Signature Work at Duke Kunshan, Framing the Crisis (2024), under Prof. Andrew Macdonald. The thesis itself is technical — 1,161 articles, LDA topic modeling, hand-coded content analysis. The point I want to make here is small enough to make without any of that.

What I actually read

For three months — April 1 to June 1, 2022 — Shanghai was locked down. Twenty-six million people, food shortages, a collapsing testing apparatus, the whole thing. I scraped four newspapers across that window:

• People's Daily (人民日报) and Global Times (环球时报) — the central organs.
• Jiefang Daily (解放日报) and Xinmin Evening Post (新民晚报) — Shanghai's two big local papers.

Same event. Same language. Different audiences. 1,161 articles in total — 386 central, 775 local. The local corpus was bigger because local news has to operate at local resolution: which neighborhood is sealed, which testing site is overwhelmed, which residential committee is doing groceries today. The central organs do not cover those things. The local papers have no choice.

What the papers were doing differently

I ran two passes. First, an LDA topic model — let the machine find what each corpus was actually about, then label the topics. Second, a hand-coded content analysis on a stratified sample of seventy-six articles, scored along four dimensions: who do they cite, what kind of article is it, what's the tone, what's the frame.

Reading the numbers off the bar charts:

• Sources. Central media cited government officials in 67% of pieces; local media in 25%. Local media cited ordinary people in 51% of pieces; central media in 11%.
• Nature. 78% of central articles were information-sharing or government announcements; only 11% were narrative. Local: 34% information-sharing, 55% narrative.
• Tone. Central media leaned authoritative (56%); local media leaned warm and sympathetic (61% warm + 37% sympathetic).
• Framing. Both papers used resilience heavily, but local papers also concentrated on local community response (46% vs central's 11%), while central concentrated on the national economy (67% vs local's 22%).

This is the picture: two halves of a single apparatus, doing complementary work. Hard propaganda upstream — authoritative voice, official sources, national-cohesion themes. Soft propaganda downstream — warm voice, ordinary-people sources, community-resilience themes. They were not contradicting each other. They were covering different shifts.

The one number I keep coming back to

The temporal evolution of the local papers is what stayed with me. In April, when the lockdown began, local coverage was relatively balanced: roughly even amounts of struggle (45%), resilience (45%), health (50%), and local community response (55%). A city telling itself what was happening to it.

By May — the worst month, when public morale was visibly cracking — that balance collapsed. Resilience surged to 91% of all local-paper framing. Almost everything else got crowded out. Coverage became one long narrative about endurance, survival, holding on.

You can read that as cynicism (the apparatus pivoting into morale management when reality stopped cooperating) or as obligation (the local press doing what it always does in a crisis its readers are physically inside) or as both. The number itself is what the topic model and the coded sample agree on. By June, as the city began to unlock, the resilience share fell back to 43% and local response — community efforts, neighborhood organizing, recovery — rose to 48%. The story shifted again.

What I take from it

Two things. First, that "Chinese state media" treated as a single object is the wrong unit of analysis. The system is stratified: central does signaling and information control, local does empathy and morale management, and the coordination between them is more interesting than either piece alone.

Second, that what propaganda omits and re-weights over time is often more revealing than what it asserts. Nobody in May 2022 was lying about resilience. They were just talking about almost nothing else. When ninety-one percent of a corpus collapses onto one frame, the frame stops being a description and starts being a job.

The thesis itself — methodology, full topic tables, the coding scheme — lives here.