Narrative as Strategy: A Study on Central-Local Interaction in China's Tobacco Control Policy

Abstract

China's tobacco control policy presents a central-local asymmetric pattern characterized by "long-term absence of central legislation and continuous progress in local legislation." Against this institutional backdrop, how the central and local governments coordinate actions and form policy consensus on tobacco control has become a theoretical question in need of an answer. This study, based on the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) and integrated with the Social Construction of Target Populations (SCTP) theory, adopts a bilingual corpus comparative text analysis method to systematically code and analyze 110 central and local media reports and seven local tobacco control regulations from 2016 to 2026. The study finds that central and local narratives exhibit a coordinated model of "central government sets the direction, local governments ensure implementation." Central narratives construct the problem framework through the "villain-victim" pair and strong causal attribution; local narratives demonstrate action outcomes through the "hero-beneficiary" pair and emotional mobilization. Narrative characters correspond to target group types in the regulations: victims correspond to dependents, villains correspond to contenders and deviants, heroes correspond to the advantaged, and beneficiaries correspond to the service recipients of incentive-based tools. Under the constraint of absent national unified legislation, central narratives perform a compensatory function, providing a discursive framework and legitimacy foundation for local legislation; local legislation then provides supplementation through specific provisions. The two cases of Chongqing and Xi'an further reveal that when local interests conflict with central narratives, a pattern of narrative compliance but institutional deviation may emerge. This study expands the narrative interaction typology within the NPF by adding a new variant of narrative coordination, providing theoretical tools and empirical evidence for understanding the operational logic of policy narratives under a consensus-based political system.