Search

Building Effective Crisis Communications for Disaster Recovery: A Case of Earthquake Reconstruction and Rehabilitation in Sichuan, China reviews and evaluates public relations (PR) campaigns launched by the Chinese government to facilitate long-term disaster recovery after the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008. The Discourse of Renewal (DR) theory is employed to guide the study and explore how the Chinese government utilized communication to help communities recover from disaster and promote community growth. Steered by the co-creational perspective, this book also examines the influence of PR campaigns on the public's situation awareness, attitude agreement, perceived care and concern, and ultimately the public's relationship with the Chinese government in renewal. In addition to developing and testing a DR evaluation model, this study investigates the communication obstacles that constrain the effectiveness of DR. In-depth interviews, content analysis, and surveys are conducted to analyze the themes, characteristics, effectiveness, and barriers of the campaigns. The findings of Building Effective Crisis Communications for Disaster Recovery include that (1) DR theory, which has heretofore been developed and applied mainly in Western culture, can inform the study of crisis communication in an Eastern culture, especially in China, (2) DR employed in government campaigns can be very powerful in achieving PR goals in crisis renewal, and (3) imbalanced deployment of campaign resources can affect the outcome of DR. This book also discusses the implications of utilizing these findings to better plan and implement long-term DR campaigns.

The 2008 Sichuan earthquake killed 87,000 people and left 5 million homeless. In response to the devastation, an unprecedented wave of volunteers and civic associations streamed into Sichuan to offer help. The Politics of Compassion examines how civically engaged citizens acted on the ground, how they understood the meaning of their actions, and how the political climate shaped their actions and understandings. Using extensive data from interviews, observations, and textual materials, Bin Xu shows that the large-scale civic engagement was not just a natural outpouring of compassion, but also a complex social process, both enabled and constrained by the authoritarian political context. While volunteers expressed their sympathy toward the affected people's suffering, many avoided explicitly talking about the causes of the suffering—particularly in the case of the collapse of thousands of schools. Xu shows that this silence and apathy is explained by a general inability to discuss politically sensitive issues while living in a repressive state. This book is a powerful account of how the widespread death and suffering caused by the earthquake illuminates the moral-political dilemma faced by Chinese citizens and provides a window into the world of civic engagement in contemporary China.