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This paper provides a national narrative of the rise of public relations (PR) as an academic discipline in China, particularly how the PR discipline has emerged and figured in global and local historical events and struggled for legitimacy throughout China's modernization from 1985 to 2018. Based on our historical review, five distinct periods in search of academic legitimacy have characterized the national modernization in China. Universal theoretical perspectives – PR's introduction as a discipline in a modernizing economy – are inadequate to explain this history. By showing divergent forces affecting academic legitimacy, this study contributes a historical perspective on understanding the PR discipline in China within a glocalization context. Our paper proposes a 'glocal' framework to show the divergent historical stresses affecting PR's academic legitimacy in China's recent historical context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study develops a model for analyzing the flow of frames and the multiple levels of framing effects in Chinese crisis communication both online and offline. To investigate the convergence and/or divergence of traditional media and social media in framing a crisis event in China, the study uses the sample of a celebrity scandal case that received extensive attention both online and offline. The empirical findings showed that crisis communicative strategies (CCSs), that is, the frames used in crisis communication, were correlated with those used in newspaper coverage (i.e. frames in representation) but were not correlated with the CCSs used by the online public (i.e. frames in thoughts). Specific and defensive CCSs, such as attacking the accusers and denial, led to fewer favorable responsibility-oriented frames than ambiguous strategies, such as excuses and justification. This finding supports the assumptions of classic situational crisis communication theory. However, none of the above-mentioned CCSs significantly predicted the relationship-oriented frames in thoughts. Relationship-oriented frames were found to be a predictor of the valence of online public opinion whereas no CCS was observed to be influential in the online public opinions expressed by social media users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]