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COMMUNICATING HEALTH-RELATED RISK AND CRISIS IN CHINA
State of the Field and Ways Forward
Zixue Tai, Zhian Zhang, and Lifeng Deng
Introduction: The Coming of Risk Society in China
Breakneck economic growth in the past three decades or so in China has ushered in an era of unprecedented prosperity in the country. Simultaneous developments on multiple fronts—including increasing technological advancement, further marketization, rapid urbanization, large-scale industrialization, and growing integration with the global society—have disentangled the milieu of forces turning contemporary Chinese society into one that bears resemblance to the risk society as conceptualized by Ulrich Beck (1992). It is no accident that the Chinese version of Beck’s book was published in China in 2004, along with a few other works of his around the time (Beck, Deng, & Shen, 2010), when fears of an expansive assortment of risks became a nationwide plague in China. Beck’s theory of risk society has become a steady inspiration for academic debates and scholarly contemplations in China since the late 1990s.
Historically, China has had its share of natural disasters and hazards such as floods, earthquakes, droughts, and tropical cyclones. This has been exacerbated by human-manufactured risks as a result of environmental deterioration ranging from “air pollution, biodiversity losses, cropland losses, depleted fisheries, desertification, disappearing wetlands, grassland degradation, and increasing frequency and scale of human-induced natural disasters, to invasive species, overgrazing, interrupted river flow, salinization, soil erosion, trash accumulation, and water pollution and shortages” (Liu & Diamond, 2005, p. 1179). The impact on everyday life is direct and far-reaching, often resulting in devastating loss of human lives and disruption of social order.
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Against this backdrop, risk communication has garnered quite a bit of interest from researchers and practitioners alike in China lately. Our chapter aims to present a critical overview of the state of the field of risk communication in China and suggest a few key areas in which breakthroughs should and can be made to move the field forward. In the sections that follow, we first scrutinize the major issues and challenges in relation to a variety of health and medical risks, and then survey the current state of science communication as it relates to nuclear energy. We next highlight a few major areas of crisis and risk communication that are of special relevance to the community of researchers focusing on China and discuss how communication researchers may contribute to the improvement in the practices of risk assessment, risk management, and risk governance. We argue that the complexity of risk issues calls for an integrated and comprehensive approach embracing perspectives from—and collaboration with—natural sciences, government regulators, and the general public.
Public Health Issues and Medical Risks
Material prosperity has dramatically elevated the standard of life across China. Compared with the old days when food supply was scarce and dietary structure was highly limited for the vast populace, most people now enjoy an era of abundance and choice in the country. As a result, the average family pays an increasing amount of attention to what they have in the food basket and on the dining table. In response to this emergent popular demand, a specific genre of media content, led by TV programs, has garnered a large audience base in recent years. Focusing on various aspects of yangsheng, a foundational concept in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) about the maintenance of good health, these programs promote lifestyles, diet, and therapeutic practices that are not found in standard Western medical prescriptions or treatments. For example, one deeply rooted doctrine of TCM emphasizes disease prevention through particular food ingredients in the daily diet. Feeding on that folklore belief, many cable channels have regular programs featuring proclaimed TCM masters preaching specific dietary recipes catering to people with different health issues and conditions.
Health-related programs on TV have become popular mainly for two reasons. First, rising public awareness about health issues and food safety in recent years has inflated popular demand for a variety of health-promoting information, and television, as the most popular medium of mass entertainment in China, naturally becomes the venue of choice for the general populace. Second, the typical format of yangsheng programs, which mostly feature a host plus a handful of special guests, often with limited interaction with a studio audience, makes this a low-cost endeavor in comparison with most other program genres. In one instance, Zhang Wuben, a self-branded TCM health expert who earned national fame through his appearance on a popular health diet program from Hunan Cable Channel, enjoyed ratings that were consistently ranked only second to CCTV News for primetime TV viewing. Using the slogan that “food diet can fight or feed the disease,” what he preached on television reached such hype that the food ingredients he mentioned on the show would cause price hikes in grocery markets in many cities across the country. Of particular note is that the price of mung beans in many places nearly quadrupled for months in mid-2010 after Zhang claimed that mung bean soup could help cure diabetes, lung cancer, pneumonia, and cardiovascular disease, among others. Zhang’s overnight fame on television made him the target of multiple investigative reports in late 2010 and early 2011, which revealed evidence of faked credentials and unsubstantiated qualifications. His clinic in Beijing was subsequently investigated for practicing TCM without proper licensing by the local government regulators. Zhang quickly fell into disgrace and oblivion.
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This inglorious incident, however, has not diminished the public craze for health-related information, and yangsheng programs have continued their prominent presence on China’s TV screen. The huge popularity of such programs has made them a prime target of state regulators. On August 26, 2016, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT) issued a directive regulating the production, format, and airing of television programs centered on food, diet, pharmaceuticals, and cosmetics (State Administration, 2016). Specifically, all such programs are required to be produced in-house by state television networks, hosts must be licensed and certified, and invited guests must show evidence of credentials in their field (e.g., official license for medicine, dietician, health professionals). For communication scholars interested in risk and crisis issues in China, some of the intriguing questions pertain to why certain audience members will almost unconditionally believe what they hear from a TV show, and what the main triggers are for mass behaviors such as the spread of misinformation, food hoarding, and crowd-based actions—a recurring theme during times of social disorder and mass panic in China.
Food has always been a defining element of Chinese culture, as testified by the oft-quoted age-old proverb in China: “To the commoners, food is heaven; To food, safety comes first.” Unfortunately, food safety has been an area of looming risk in the life of ordinary Chinese citizens in recent years. Deterioration in the natural environment is greatly to blame. Yan (2012) notes three types of problems—namely, food hygiene (e.g., problems derived from food processing and sanitation), unsafe food (e.g., issues caused by excessive use of pesticides, chemical fertilizers, hormones, steroids, and preservatives), and poisonous food (e.g., deliberate contamination)—and points out that each of them constitutes a different type of risk that calls for different solutions from health officials, government regulators, and the general public. A high-profile case that is illustrative of the myriad problems China faces in health-related risks is the 2008 melamine adulteration scandal, a widespread industry practice in China, pointing to loopholes in the current inspection, surveillance, and regulatory process (Chan, Griffiths, & Chan, 2008).
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A related topic that stirs up the popular pulse is genetically modified (GM) food. While the reasons behind the rise of this issue to prominence in public perceptions are manifold, television, as in the case of yangsheng controversies, has played an undeniable role. This is largely driven by Cui Yongyuan, an anchorperson from China Central Television (CCTV) who has achieved celebrity status for his outspokenness and prowess in picking on hot-button issues in his investigative reports. Cui has taken on GM food as his personal crusade through his primetime programs on China’s only national TV in recent years, albeit with a clearly identifiable emphasis on skepticism, dread, and unknown risks of GM food. Parallel developments have been observed in many European nations in the 1990s with regard to the perceived risk of GM food, as Finucane and Holup (2005) note in their review of cross-national research literature.
As the most populous nation in the world, China naturally faces the daunting task of producing enough food to feed its people. This is exacerbated by the lack of enough arable land, loss of farming to rapid urbanization, and deterioration of soil conditions due to excessive use of chemical fertilizers. Genetically modified crops can offer distinct benefits, such as higher yields and lower agrochemical usage; but they may also bring harm to agriculture, the environment, and human health. In particular, the prospect of higher yield makes the cultivation of GM seeds a lucrative commercial endeavor, especially for developing countries with large populations and limited land resources.
Cui and his CCTV team repeatedly claim that China has been a testing ground for a variety of novel genetically engineered crop seeds over the years, and few efforts have been made to assess their possible hazards and risk factors. Limited media coverage of GM food in China has been overwhelmingly biased toward (often exaggerated) possible risks and potential hazards to public health, which bears similarity to press coverage of related issues in the UK and Spain (Vilella-Vila & Costa-Font, 2008). On the other hand, there has been a noticeable lapse of attention to the potential positive aspects of GM food to the farming industry and the people of China. It is imperative that a more balanced approach be promoted through the media and other public forums, because media coverage indeed plays a pivotal role in the shaping of public attitude toward GM food and animals (Marques, Critchley, & Walshe, 2015).
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More importantly, an effective mechanism of government regulation and policymaking in China needs to be enforced. In that regard, experiences and lessons from other countries can enlighten debates and deliberations. As Finucane and Holup (2005, p. 1607) observe, “the reasons underlying objections to GM foods . . . often can be traced to important social-cultural beliefs, values, customs, and histories that orient and inform people making decisions in the face of uncertainty.” A viable framework regulating the commercialization of GM food is hinged on both scientific and political considerations. This is the most obvious in risk regulation of Bt maize in the US and Europe, in which Levidow noted that “pressure by industry, NGOs, and the wider public influences regulators to focus on some risks and perhaps to downplay others [in different countries]” (1999, p. 21).
Diseases and epidemics have always loomed large in actual as well as perceived threats to public health in China. More than most other countries, outbreaks of epidemics often evolve into public crisis and wreak havoc in China due to the combination of high population density, large territorial span, and particular culinary preferences. On the one hand, economic prosperity in the reform era has allowed the government to invest more resources into state-led campaigns in combatting diseases and improving public health. One indicator of dramatic progress can be found in the increase of life expectancy from 65.5 in 1980 to 76 in 2004, as reported by the World Bank (World Bank, 2017). Due to increased official support in terms of grant money and state-of-the-art research facilities, medical research in various fields has made amazing strides. At the same time, modern hospitals with up-to-date equipment have been built mostly in major cities and urban areas.
On the other hand, it is rather recent that public communication has been acknowledged to have a role to play in gaining the upper hand over diseases and epidemics. A landmark development, ironically, was made possible by the outbreak of a rare virus that for months crippled the entire country—SARS in 2003. Based on the key finding that its old response mechanism to communicable diseases was both vulnerable and inefficient, the Chinese government totally revamped its disease surveillance system and enacted the Emergency Public Health Response Regulations “with a unified command, ready reaction, and coherent, ordered, and effective operation” (Yao, Chen, Chen & Gong, 2013, p. 290). Besides a consolidated nationally coordinated infrastructure, the newly implemented disease prevention and control system places considerable emphasis on the timely disclosure of disease information and global collaboration, and has demonstrated dramatic progress in the face of succeeding pandemics such as the H7N9 virus (Hvistendahl, 2013; Yao et al., 2013). Improvement in communication and coordinated response has been a key area of focus in the new mechanism.
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Although there is a growing realization of the importance of health-related communication as a research endeavor, academic research in various areas of health communication in its current state is still in its nascent stage in China, and is severely limited in both methodological approaches and theoretical perspectives (Tai, Zhang,Wang, & Lin, 2013). Therefore, much more needs to be done in order to make “communication” a critical component of the risk and crisis management process in China. Many problems affecting public health are medical as well as communicative. For example, rumors have been a vibrant part in the everyday practice of public health and popular medicine, particularly during epidemic outbreaks (Tai & Sun, 2011). In recent years, health-related rumors have maintained a noticeable presence on China’s popular social media venues such as WeChat and Sina Weibo, which interconnect hundreds of millions of users and are important channels of public sentiments.
One hot-button issue that has haunted the health care field in China is deteriorating relations between patients and health care professionals such as doctors and nurses. De-coupling of health facilities such as hospitals from government funding in the current health care system means that delivery of health services is contingent upon financial vitality. Meanwhile, alleged over-treatment of common diseases often hits the headlines of conventional media and online postings. Common reasons cited as causes of patient-provider tensions include “defects in health policy and regulation, deficiency in humane quality, information asymmetry, poor doctor-patient communication, and physician’s overloaded pressure” (Liu, Rohrer, Luo, Fang, He & Xie, 2015, p. 4). While patients with complaints and grievances in most Western countries typically use the weapon of litigation, their Chinese counterparts most often take matters into their own hands, frequently resulting in violence targeting doctors and nurses. This practice of blaming physicians—called yinao (or “medical riots”)—is a common storyline across hospitals in China. As Liu et al. (ibid.) note, there has been intensified effort lately in improving doctor-patient communication skills in China, but much more is needed in terms of both evidence-based research and tailored assessment tools moving forward. Moreover, an effective solution to this problem will most likely require an integrated approach with participation from patients, their families, health care workers, and society at large, with communication of health risks as its core focus.
Public Understanding of Science and Environmental Risks
As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, science and technology has increasingly become an indispensable part of the overall quality of human life. Scientific literacy, which means the understanding by the general public of the nature, aims, and general limitations of science, has been recognized both as an important conceptual construct and a practical educational goal across the globe (Laugksch, 2000). China, which has benefited directly from its technology-centered approach in its national economic drives, is no exception. In the 2016 national convention on scientific and technological innovation, President Xi Jinping said improving scientific literacy among the general public, especially school-age youth, was just as important as achieving technological innovations, calling them the “two wings” of scientific development in the nation (“Cultivate,” 2016).
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There are monumental hurdles to surpass, however. Based on the three-dimensional construct (key terms and concepts; process of science; impact of science and technology) of scientific literacy as developed by Jon D. Miller (1983; 1992), the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) has conducted multiple waves of national surveys to measure the level of scientific literacy among Chinese citizens. The CAST report published in September 2015 reveals significant differences along regional, occupational, educational, and most noticeably urban-rural lines; peasants, who make up the vast majority of the population, fall substantially behind city residents. It comes perhaps as no surprise that residents in the three metropolises of Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin are leading the nation (reaching proficiency levels of 18.71%, 17.56%, and 12% respectively), comparable to the percentage points scored by the US and Western Europe in 2000. China’s national average of 6.2%, however, lags by a large margin behind the current measures in the US and Western European countries (News China, 2015).
Our purpose is, of course, not to discuss the niceties of the status of scientific literacy in China. Nonetheless, as a widely recognized measure for attitudes, attentiveness, and knowledge about science by the general public, these findings about scientific literacy in China set the appropriate background for us to assess the variety of challenges that lie ahead in our discussion of promoting understanding of risk factors in the context of an increasingly technologically dependent society in China. We confine our discussion to a number of environmental risks that have agitated the popular psyche in the past decade or so.
China’s engine of economic growth begets more energy consumption, so electricity has figured prominently in state planning since the late 1970s. Explosive growth in electricity output is also necessitated by civilian use in China’s sprawling urban areas. While coal-operated power plants supplemented by hydro-power were the norm in the 1980s, nuclear energy has been the primary target lately. At the start of 2016, the Chinese government announced that it will build a total of 30 nuclear reactor units in the next five years (2016–2020), equal to the number of units completed in the past 30 years (1985–2015) (China Business, 2016). Meanwhile, on January 27, 2016, the Information Office of the State Council issued a white paper titled “China’s Nuclear Emergency Preparedness,” which mapped out the country’s nuclear policy including its overarching goals of utilizing nuclear energy and the national emergency response mechanism to ensure public safety.
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This formation of a national nuclear policy stipulating the dual goal of promising security along with ambitious expansion takes place at a time when public anxiety about potential threat from nuclear energy is at a new high. In the early phase of China’s nuclear power plant drive, around 1985, site selection was a competitive process among local governments, because being chosen for a new plant promised billions of dollars of investment from the state, new employment for local residents, and a guaranteed boost for electricity supplies in the area. All this, of course, eventually translates into an increase in the local GDP, an important benchmark for promotion and advancement in the Chinese official echelon. To a large extent, officials had also been quite successful in rallying support from the local residents in bidding for nuclear plant projects.
A turning point was the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster that took place on March 11, 2011, in Japan. The tsunami triggered by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake caused nuclear meltdowns in the reactors, which led to radioactive material leakages the following day. This turned out to be the worst nuclear disaster since the 1986 Chernobyl incident, and the Chinese media went into full swing in covering this tragedy as it was unfolding. For months, gloomy images of fatalities, toppled buildings, and ensuing evacuations on China’s television left a shocking and lasting impact on Chinese audiences about the catastrophic side of a nuclear power plant. Moreover, because this involves Japan, China’s traditional foe, the media was relentless in subsequent coverage of a variety of short-term and long-term consequences for human life and the environment. All this produced the (very much unintended, probably) effect of changing public perceptions and inducing alarm in the general populace about nuclear energy.
This extensive coverage of nuclear technology, mostly focused on the disastrous fallouts, has been unprecedented in the Chinese media. What had happened in Japan, naturally, could happen in China. This prospect, no matter how remote the government alleges that may be, has triggered a series of discussions that had been lacking previously across multiple media platforms on the dark side of nuclear energy. As Xu (2008) observes, focal points of the debates from the 1980s to the 2000s had been largely centered on how to implement the government’s nuclear expansion ambition; little challenge was raised to the government plan in expanding nuclear power use. In the new round of debates, a prominent voice of opposition has been Wang Yinan, senior researcher at the State Council Development Research Center. Wang was thrust into the center of national attention through an article she published on April 4, 2014, on China Energy News, China’s national newspaper specializing in energy policy and technology (Wang, 2014). Wang made the case in the article against building nuclear power plants in inner areas in China due to technological and environmental constraints. Her affiliation with the main research arm of the national governing body, the State Council, probably garnered attenuated attention to her views, which had been widely circulated via conventional and online media forums. As a matter of fact, in the coastal province of Guangdong, news media were asked to remove coverage of her viewpoints and stay away from interviewing her for fear of invigorating public animosity toward nuclear power initiatives in their vicinity (Hu, 2014). Noticeably, dissenting voices that run against the state policy advocating more nuclear energy have been drastically diminished since 2015 when the government stepped up its effort of nuclear power plant construction.
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The government plan, however, is increasingly becoming a hard sell to the general public. In recent years, public protests against local nuclear power plants have risen to an all-time high across the country. For example, days of public demonstrations halted the plan by the city officials of Lianyungang in Jiangsu Province to build a planned nuclear waste processing plant there (Meizhou Net, 2016); villagers in the suburbs of Lufeng in Guangdong Province confronted construction crews and obstructed on-site work for Lufeng Nuclear Power Plant, which is designated a National Key Project (NetEase, 2015). In one extreme case, about a year after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, hundreds of local residents in the coastal city of Qingdao staged protests against the construction of a transformer substation within a kilometer of residential apartments for fear of health hazards due to radiation exposure (Phoenix Daily, 2016).
Environmental concerns that trigger mass protest and collective action go far beyond nuclear energy. Issues of increasing popular contention in the past decade have included grassroots efforts to halt p-Xylene plants and incinerators in multiple cities across China (Tai, 2015). Due to rising public awareness and shared concerns, major development projects that are lauded to bring in huge economic benefits by the government but are perceived to incur environmental risks are met with more and more resistance by local residents. As Steinhardt and Wu (2016) point out, this new repertoire of contention is becoming more widespread and often shapes government policymaking at the local and national levels. Within this context, it is imperative that all parties involved in environmental issues be properly informed in understanding and assessing potential risks before important decisions can be made and critical actions taken.
In actuality, various practices of information control and manipulation by invested individuals, advocacy groups, affected parties, and above all, government entities tangle up the communicative and deliberative processes for most undertakings that prioritize developmental opportunities over environmental concerns. In the case of nuclear energy, the survey of Chinese citizens after the Fukushima accident by He and colleagues (2014) shows that, despite a dramatic increase in public knowledge about the Fukushima disaster, most people still know little about nuclear power, nuclear technologies, and radiation risks in China; moreover, limited channels of information are available to the average citizen about nuclear energy in China, and government-supplied information—the dominant source of communication to the public—still sways public perceptions quite a bit. Sun and Zhu (2014) found evidence that more balanced information and transparency will decrease public perceptions of nuclear power risks and increase public support for state nuclear power policy.
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We believe that now is the time to recognize the much-needed role that social sciences can play in the process of advancing public perceptions of risks in science and other fields in China. We call for an integrated approach incorporating insights of the natural, technical, and social sciences in risk assessment and risk management as mapped out by Renn (1998) to come to grips with dual aspects of risks in society as both a technical probability and as a social construction. Specifically, it is our contention that communication science has a vital part to fulfill with the tasks of the AEIOU (Awareness, Enjoyment, Interest, Opinion-forming, and Understanding of science) responses as suggested by Burns, O’Connor, and Stocklmayer (2003).
Moving the Field Forward in China: Bring Communication In
Although risk has always been an essential part of human existence, the systematic and scientific study of risk is only a post–World War II endeavor (Renn, 1998), and the identification of risk communication research as a distinct field of scholarly inquiry and professional pursuit has only occurred since the 1980s (Palenchar, 2009). By contrast, the history of risk research has a much shorter history in China, and risk communication as a subject matter is still in its nascent stage. But we must also acknowledge that we are witnessing a moment of juncture for the field in which exciting opportunities are emerging on the horizon amidst significant hurdles and variegated challenges.
Risk is often understood to be “the possibility that human actions or events lead to consequences that affect aspects of what humans value” (Renn, 1998, p. 51; emphasis original). Simultaneous developments in China in the past decades have led to the current era of proliferation of risks: rapid industrialization and technology-driven modernization in the country’s economic expansion initiatives; massive urbanization in a relatively short span of time that disrupts conventional social structures and communal arrangements; widespread adoption of information technologies and changing media environment that heightens public attentiveness to and awareness of hazardous issues; increasing globalization and integration that bring more and more people up to speed with prevalent global practices of risk consciousness. These miscellaneous transformations in Chinese society naturally result in an elevated sense of uncertainty, and contribute to the physical (actual) presence and people’s perceptions of risks, as aptly summarized by Lerbinger (2012, p. 22): “The incidence and severity of crises is rising with the complexity of technology and society.” To exacerbate the situation, the crisis response mechanism, which tends to be largely government-centered, is still inefficient and inadequate under most circumstances.
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Risk and crisis communication almost invariably assigns the media a central place in the process. Predictably, the role of the media has attracted considerable attention from communication scholars in the West. In the case of China, because journalism and media has dominated the history of communication research, perspectives on risk and crisis topics have displayed a lopsided focus on the media, with a heavy emphasis on media coverage of prominent events and key issues. Although media coverage is an important topic, as we have shown in our previous discussion of yangsheng-related TV programs, we need to move further by exploring the motivating factors influencing audience choice and perception of particular media sources, and more importantly, how mediated information shapes public behaviors.
The state’s involvement in the media business is an important factor to consider, particularly in China. In general, the state media still plays a vital role in communicating risk-related information to the public, as He, Mol, Zhang, & Lu (2014) showed in their research on nuclear energy. Compared with the commercial media system in the West, state control of the media in China may create an advantage in the promotion of public interest that aligns well with state-designated goals, and the ability of the state to mobilize media in combination with other resources towards broad goals of informing the public, coordinating individual and collective efforts, and organizing mass actions. On the other hand, when there is a compelling state interest that conflicts with that of the public, the state power may be inclined to manipulate the media for its own gains, as we have seen in numerous cases in the past, especially under particular circumstances in which risks manifested into public crises (Tai & Sun, 2007). It may be beyond the capability of communication researchers to subvert the media system, but the media environment and related dynamics are important to keep in mind in evaluating the role and designing uses of the media in risk and crisis communication.
Meanwhile, social media and other new platforms of communication assume an undeniable place in the process. To a great extent, because new media is dominated by user-contributed content, new media communication affords new possibilities and often empowers the grassroots and the traditionally resource-poor constituents. This is a promising research stream for both academia and practitioners. Indeed, in an era of information abundance saturated by social media, smart phones, and personal devices, promising opportunities co-exist with emerging challenges. In that regard, staying current with the always-evolving new media environment is also an exciting way for researchers to develop fresh perspectives and make breakthroughs. A useful example is the research by Pei, Yu, Tian, and Donnelley (2017), which demonstrates techniques of forecasting mass concern about public health issues by monitoring news media on microblog (Weibo) sites. Research findings following similar lines have important practical implications, because early detection mechanisms, once proven reliable, may help crisis managers handle anticipated public reactions and social tensions in a timely, efficient, and proactive manner.
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A hallmark of the science of crisis and risk communication has been its supra-disciplinary nature in perspectives and approaches. Because risk and crisis issues always intersect with people in a specific social setting, “we can only understand crisis and risk communication by first examining the nature of people and society they build” (Heath & O’Hair, 2009, p. 5). Cross-pollination involving sciences of different practices, therefore, is critically important in deciphering the puzzles of risk communication. Meeting the goals of science of communication, Baruch Fischhoff (2013, p. 14038) remarks, “requires collaboration between scientists with subject matter knowledge to communicate and scientists with expertise in communication processes – along with practitioners able to manage the process.” Cecile Wendling (2012) astutely observes that when it comes to risk expertise in the Western nations, there is a noticeable gap between what social scientists do and what natural scientists and public policy makers actually expect from them; and natural scientists typically view the risk assessment and risk management processes as linear and instrumental, while social scientists assume the role of “mediator” or “communicator” between the natural scientists and the public. On the contrary, the participation of social scientists in the risk processes should lead to “a deeper debate” about offering alternative models to the linear approach, and moreover,
They can help society rethink the process of risk assessment and risk management, which could become more iterative, more integrated, and more inclusive. Including social scientists in the expertise processes could be way to benefit from the extremely wide range of social science research available, and in so doing make better informed decisions and recommendations.
(Wendling, 2012, p. 490)
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This is a great guidebook for Chinese researchers to follow as well, especially with regard to the field of communication, which has not been aggressive in embracing inter-disciplinary approaches or collaborating with colleagues in other social sciences fields. Additionally, voices from social scientists are woefully needed considering that the current Chinese regulatory approach to environmental, health, technological, and other risks predominantly privileges the natural sciences perspectives, and social sciences are assigned the role of aiding what natural scientists have put on the table. In this regard, there is a noticeable parallel between the approach in China and what we have seen in the early years of risk regulation in the Western context (e.g., Jasanoff, 2009; Palenchar, 2009; Renn, 1998).
There is now a general consensus among scholars across national settings that risk is a multifaceted concept. The dichotomy between “objective risk” (based on scientific facts, technological data, or actuarial probability) and “subjective risk” (shaped by emotions and values) is often highlighted (Hermansson, 2012), and risk communication takes on both scientific (technical) as well as social-cultural dimensions (Heath & O’Hair, 2009). According to the risk rituals model, “the public perception of risk . . . is symbolic of social processes, dispositions, and deep cultural structures” (Moore & Burgess, 2011, p. 112). The Carnegie Mellon mental-model approach to risk communication, as elaborated by Morgan, Fischhoff, Bostrom and Atman (2002), argues that lay beliefs about risk are formed based on both specific facts and cognitive heuristics internalized through social and cultural learning; these perceptions are then reinforced or modified by the media and other communication processes. Of note is that communication is inherently built into these models. In the case of China, other important factors to take into account are special cultural values and social traditions that figure sizably into public perceptions of risk. These are the key areas that communication scholars can leave an imprint on risk research.
How risk is conceptualized affects how it is assessed, regulated, and managed. Because communication plays a pivotal role in all risk processes, it is imperative that communication experts share their insight over how risk is understood through evidence-based and theory-informed research (assessment), contribute to risk-informed policymaking by the government and public institutions (regulation), and have their say in suggesting pragmatic communication guidelines and preparedness in tackling important risk issues (management). Strategically, as an applied field of inquiry, risk researchers “need to maintain a balance between theoretical and practical significance” (Lindell, 2013, p. 812), and strive to link practical problems with appropriate broader theories and perspectives. More importantly, communication scholars should lead the charge in promoting dialogues with and participation from the general public in the risk communication process, and embrace the role of advocating for the vulnerable, the underprivileged, and the resource-poor groups that are easily impacted in the most negative way by risks in society. These are no easy tasks, especially in the political environment in China; but communication scholars have the moral and social obligation to bear the brunt of these responsibilities.
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Concluding Remarks
Decades of economic expansion, industrialization, and urbanization in China have unleashed the risk genie from its bottle. As a result, the contemporary era of affluence has been concurrently plagued by the rise of uncertainty and risk in a wide range of areas spanning from environmental deterioration to food contamination to epidemics and natural disasters. Indeed, Ulrich Beck’s risk society has found manifestations—with myriad parallels, unique twists, and drastic transformations—in its Chinese version. While the handling of potential and manifested risks in the form of public crises and emergencies has been high on the agenda of the Chinese government in recent years, the outcomes have been varied, showing significant accomplishments in some areas but leaving important improvement to be desired in other areas.
The SARS outbreak in 2003 has become a milestone event in risk and crisis communication in China because it has amplified attention to this area on an unprecedented scale from diverse constituents and stakeholders— scientists (both from the natural and social sciences), government agencies and regulators at the local and national level, media scholars and practitioners, and the general public. Vigorous research and debates among academics and practitioners have also produced encouraging outcomes, including a paradigm shift in the government response to public health crises and the elevation of the (both old and new) media to prominent roles in the process of communicating health risks to the public. Nonetheless, risk research in general and risk communication in particular is still in its nascent stage, monumental challenges still exist, and much is to be done in the field. At this juncture, we urge communication researchers in China to answer the call and rise to the challenge of the times. This coincides with a moment when communication as a discipline in China is searching for its identity and is seeking to make strides. Risk communication may be one of the subfields in which such breakthrough accomplishments are possible.
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