Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Public Relations Review journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pubrev Online crisis communication in a post-truth Chinese society: Evidence from interdisciplinary literature Yang Cheng a, ⁎ , Chia-Jui Lee b a Department of Communication, North Carolina State University, Office: 222 Winston Hall, Raleigh, NC, United States b Department of Communication, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, United States ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Social media Post-truth Misinformation Context Crisis communication strategies Trust China ABSTRACT Through a thematic content analysis of 118 journal articles from interdisciplinary fields, this study reviews the research trends of online crisis communication literature in a Chinese post- truth society, where objective facts play a diminishing role, and Chinese people are losing their trust, despite the best efforts of organizations to deal with fake news in crises. Results of this study disclose some unique crisis communication strategies (e.g., strategic distraction, rumor- rebuttal, fabrication, acting cute, and content censorship) in crises of China. Influential con- textual factors such as the political system, cultural values, and media features are identified as well. Theoretical and practical implications of this study are discussed, and a greater picture of online crisis communication in contexts is posited for future research. 1. Introduction Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Weibo in the past decades have dramatically changed the field of crisis communication. On the one hand, both organizations and their publics can interactively communicate on digital platforms and depend on the new technological tools at any point and in everywhere (Westlund, 2013). On the other hand, a rise of crises occurred because of disruptive effects of the post-truth era, when false or inaccurate information was quickly and widely spread on new media, general public lost trust in institutions and organizations became more fragile than before (Chen & Cheng, 2019). To understand the influence of social media on crisis communication, global scholars began to focus on this field. For instance, researchers (e.g., Austin, Fraustino, Jin, & Liu, 2017) created a social-mediated crisis communication (SMCC) model to examine associations between orga- nizations, social and traditional media, online and offline public, and word-of-mouth communication in crises. Besides this SMCC framework, other theories such as media richness, uses and gratifications, and framing theories were adopted as well to study social media types, messages, effects on publics in crisis communication (Utz, Schultz, & Glocka, 2013). To extend the existing scholarship of global public relations and provide an up-to-date review research, this study pursued a thematic review of the Chinese online crisis communication research published in 88 journals from 2006 to 2018, exploring the research trends, contextual factors, crisis communication strategies (CCSs) adopted by different actors such as governments, NGOs, and corporations in China. Driven by the fragmented and local social media platforms such as Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo, Renren, and WeChat, the information transmission in China is becoming polarized and contentious (Chiu, Ip, & Silverman, 2012). In crisis communication, misinformation and hoaxes were accelerating and affecting the way individuals interpret daily developments. China, as an authoritarian society has developed new platforms and used artificial intelligence to identify and debunk rumor contents on https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2019.101826 Received 21 August 2018; Received in revised form 9 June 2019; Accepted 9 July 2019 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: ycheng20@ncsu.edu (Y. Cheng). Public Relations Review xxx (xxxx) xxxx 0363-8111/ © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Please cite this article as: Yang Cheng and Chia-Jui Lee, Public Relations Review, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2019.101826