Legitimizing Through Crisis Communication: How Chinese Mainstream Media Frame Government Image in the First Wave Covid-19 Pandemic

How does political authority reproduce itself in moments of acute crisis? This study examines how Changjiang Daily, Wuhan’s principal state-aligned newspaper, constructed government image during the first wave of Covid-19. Drawing on a directed content analysis of 1,027 articles and guided by a multidimensional framework integrating four dimensions: leadership, accountability, transparency, and adaptability, this study reveals that crisis communication in the Chinese context operates as a strategically orchestrated legitimacy project. Three findings stand out. First, government image was dynamically reconfigured across discernible crisis phases, demonstrating that legitimacy construction is temporally sensitive. Second, the structural dominance of leadership and adaptability over transparency reflects a deeper institutional logic of performance legitimacy, in which authority rests on demonstrated capacity rather than procedural openness. Third, praise and blame were distributed hierarchically: negative framing concentrated at the grassroots level while central authority retained uniformly positive coverage, revealing how state media functions not merely as a mirror of political trust but as one of its primary generative instruments. These findings offer a replicable analytical architecture for comparative crisis communication research.