This paper investigates anti-pandemic slogans as institutional discourse in Chinese official and semi-official media during the COVID-19 crisis. These slogans, circulating across traditional and digital platforms, served not only as tools for health communication but also as vehicles of ideological alignment and social mobilization.

Adopting approaches from critical discourse analysis, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics, this study analyses how these slogans construct meaning, reinforce political legitimacy, and shape public behaviour. The study identifies three key strategies: lexical innovation (new lexical blends), the idiomatic recontextualization (flexible use of chengyu), and the use of imperative syntactic structures. This study contributes to the understanding of how language operates as a mode of governance and ideological disseminatiod: based on a corpus of 300+ slogans, collected from Chinese social media platforms, the analysis reveals how linguistic creativity responded to mobilize during an evolving emergency and reinforced state narratives. Ultimately, this article highlights the relevance of discourse-based approaches in analysing contemporary Chinese media and illustrates how language shapes perceptions, behaviour, and collective memory in times of crisis.

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