Soil pollution in China: Policymaking and narratives

Soil pollution has been a serious environmental problem in China for decades with focusing events happening from time to time in different regions. This study unpacks the making of China’s first soil pollution law, which was passed in 2018 and zooms in on how soil pollution is discussed on social media. It does so through a case study that uses the narrative policy framework (NPF) to analyze media coverage of a major soil pollution event in China that occurred in 2016 at the Changzhou Foreign Languages School in Jiangsu Province. We use a dataset consisting of articles published on the Chinese social media platform WeChat. In the analysis, we employ a codebook and code the NPF elements in all the articles using NVivo. The results contribute to our understanding of environmental pollution in China while deepening our understanding of how the way in which environmental pollution is discussed shapes policymaking.