What is a Campaign in China? Devising a New Chinese Term and Definition for a Campaign to Improve Health Communication

When searching the literature on health communication in China and abroad, a campaign is very important in communication studies, and the English word campaign has various Chinese translations in China. Therefore, it’s difficult to comprehend and communicate when campaign is used as a professional term in Chinese. In addition, we found campaign has a clear application effect on disease prevention, and thus we planned to solve the problem of campaign in China based on literature from the disease prevention campaign. We reviewed 1177 articles in core journals published from 1997 to 2016 in China and abroad. After 2 sets of manual screening in 7 steps, 284 relevant articles were obtained. Based on the research direction of a case study, we finally obtained 54 articles. Subsequently, we applied an inductive and comparative analysis to determine the characteristics of campaigns and to deduce the definitions of campaign and health communication campaign in Chinese and English, and suitable Chinese translations. This study fills the gap in Chinese health communication research about campaign translation for more than 60 years, provides a scientific reference to campaign for health communication researchers, and establishes effective communication in the same context for Chinese and international campaign case studies.