Table 2 Coding scheme.

Theme

Coding methods are used to develop themes from theory (Strauss and Corbin 1998).

A continuous comparison method was used, and all short videos were checked by two coders with extensive experience in content analysis and the coders assessed the presence (1) or absence (0) of the above themes. The coder first identified and refined the themes and subthemes that appeared in the short video and then integrated the categories. After the topic categories were determined, the individual short videos were placed in those categories. By modeling the themes of caption text, this study summarizes the five main themes of Chinese government short videos, as shown in Table 3.

Visual Characters

The visual characters of a short video include things that provide characterization as well as relevant news facts.

Visual character coding was introduced to enable more effective categorization of the visual elements. (McQuail 1961; Bowen 2002; Goldstein 2009). Short video visual characters specifically refer to the characters that dominate the video, at the operational level, the characters are categorized and counted according to their occupations and political identities, as shown in Table 4 (Rangan and Kull 2009; Lemke 2009; Wang 2020; Yan 2020).

Emotional Propaganda

Categorizing and coding emotional advocacy allows for a clearer analysis of visual works and reveals the mobilizing functions embedded in them (Plutchik 1984; Izard 1992).

Emotional propaganda covers short videos designed to raise awareness or attract attention by eliciting emotions such as public outrage or sympathy for one’s people. At the level of emotion space construction, Plutchik (1984) created a three-dimensional model of emotion used to describe different dimensions of human emotion and proposed eight types of emotion. Evaluating the actual situation of the Chinese government’s short video propaganda, this paper applied four emotional labels, as shown in Table 5.