Communicating health-related risk and crisis in China: State of the field and ways forward

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.