Earlier this year, allegations of mistreatment of Chinese pandas at the Memphis Zoo, such as “lack of fresh bamboo” and “emaciation” … circulated online. Kourtney Jenney, Chief Life Sciences Officer at Memphis Zoo, explained that Ya Ya is small in stature and has a skin condition causing seasonal hair thinning, which contrasts with the public’s image of a plump, furry giant panda. In response to public concerns, Beijing Zoo dispatched veterinarians and keepers with extensive experience in giant panda husbandry and medical care to Memphis Zoo. Their mission was to familiarize themselves with Ya Ya’s habits and care routines, learn the gestures and commands used by Memphis staff to communicate with her, and ensure her safe and secure repatriation (Yan et al., 2023).

This study analyzed the public attention surrounding the incident during the data analysis phase. According to integrated data from DFRLab covering WeChat, Weibo, Baidu, and Douyin (Graph 1), public interest peaked on April 27, when Ya Ya returned, and May 29, when she was transferred to Beijing Zoo.

Graph 1. Line chart of public engagement in the incident (Source: DFRLab)

This study’s data are drawn from Weibo hashtag metrics, where Ya Ya-related tags have consistently ranked as “trending topics” since the incident’s onset. Four high-traffic, relevant hashtags were selected for analysis (Table 2). For example, as of August 2025, the hashtag #WelcomeYaYaHomeTogether alone generated 3.6 million original posts and amassed 620 million views. Moreover, the impact of Ya Ya’s repatriation extended beyond July and August 2023, with a long-tail effect lasting until August 3, 2025. On Ya Ya’s 25th birthday, the hashtag #GiantPandaYaYa25thBirthday reached 11.067 million views and over 30,000 interactions. These figures indicate sustained public interest in Ya Ya, suggesting that it remains timely to publish related content.

To further analyze netizens’ discussion intentions within posts, this study combines Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) and the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP) for both quantitative and qualitative analysis, following the methodology proposed by Chunyan Huang et al. The findings reveal that personification is the predominant strategy employed by netizens, accounting for 68% of metaphoric usage. Within this category, the conceptual metaphor “panda as a person” is the most salient (2025). In other words, the majority of netizens perceive Ya Ya not as an animal but as a natural person, considering her needs from a human rather than an animal perspective.

Public concern for Ya Ya’s condition is particularly evident in the comment sections of panda-related videos posted by the official Memphis Zoo YouTube account (@MemphisZoo). This study collected several videos from this account with high relevance to Ya Ya (Table 4), analyzed the viewers’ comments, and generated a word cloud visualization (Fig. 2), which we can obverse that if individuals’ opinions were changed among these years.

It is evident that in these discussions, many netizens tend to criticize the Memphis Zoo for inadequate care of Ya Ya, even accusing the zoo of “abusing” her and labeling the institution a “murderer”, describing the decision to send the giant pandas to Memphis as a “shameful” act.

Surprisingly, comments on a video titled Ya Ya and Le Le Play in the Snow (Tag), which posted

14 years ago, express praise for Ya Ya and gratitude toward the Memphis Zoo for its care (Example 1), which starkly contrasts with comments from three years ago (Example 2). This suggests that public opinion was manipulated during this intervening period.

In order to complement the sensemaking framework with a mediated discourse approach, the article conducts a qualitative analysis of selected Weibo posts, online videos, and media headlines that shaped the rumor’s circulation. Following Scollon’s (2001) Mediated Discourse Analysis and Fairclough’s (1995) model of discourse as social practice, this study examines how linguistic and semiotic choices framed Ya Ya as a victimized national symbol, reinforcing nationalist affect.

A corpus of 500 top-commented Weibo posts under the hashtag #WelcomeYaYaHomeTogether was analyzed using Fairclough’s three-dimensional model: text, discursive practice, and social practice.

(1) Textual level. Lexical patterns such as “abuse”, “skin and bones”, and “finally home” dominate. These emotionally charged verbs and adjectives construct a victim-rescuer dichotomy, situating Ya Ya as a suffering “daughter of China”. The anthropomorphic framing transforms the panda from an animal to a human-like subject, reflecting what Huang & Wang (2025) identify as “digital panda nationalism”.

(2) Discursive practice level. Reposting behavior and hashtag cascades reveal how user-generated content (UGC) recontextualized official narratives. For instance, when People’s Daily posted “Ya Ya gained weight after returning home”, thousands of reposts appended evaluative captions such as “China’s love healed her”, reinterpreting institutional statements through collective affect. This shows that audiences did not passively receive media messages but actively co-produced the discourse, which as a hallmark of “collaborative sensemaking” (Weick, Sutcliffe & Obstfeld, 2005).

(3) Social practice level. The broader social context of Sino-U.S. tension provided ideological scaffolding for rumor proliferation. According to Van Dijk’s (1998) theory of ideological discourse, binary schemata (“us vs. them”) are reinforced through repetition of pronouns and national identifiers. This linguistic polarization reproduces national identity within mediated spaces.

The analysis demonstrates that mediation, such as the technological and institutional infrastructures of Weibo, short-video platforms, and state media, did not merely transmit discourse but constituted it. The rumor’s viral form depended on multimodal affordances: algorithmic amplification (Milli et al., 2025), affective captioning, and the meme-fiction of Ya Ya’s image (Lestari et al., 2024). Together, these affordances redefined sensemaking as a networked, emotionally contagious process rather than a purely cognitive one.

Therefore, the “Ya Ya abuse” discourse can be understood as a mediated narrative co-produced by human actors (users, journalists, activists) and nonhuman mediators (algorithms, hashtags, video formats). This perspective enriches sensemaking theory by embedding it within the materiality of digital mediation and demonstrating how meaning is both constructed and constrained by media technologies.

On July 2, 2025, the Dujiangyan People’s Court in Sichuan Province held a public first-instance trial of the defendants Bai and Xu on charges of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”. The two were sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of one year and six months and one year and two months, respectively. The judgment states:

“The court, after trial, found that from March 2023 to May 2024 the defendants Bai and Xu, in order to increase their popularity, expand their influence, and obtain economic benefits, knowingly disseminated false information on a certain online platform via livestreams and short videos. They fabricated and spread untrue claims that a certain research institution and its staff abused giant pandas and exploited the animals for profit, and they invented false reports that staff members of the research institution had been detained for legal and disciplinary violations. They thereby incited netizens to lodge complaints, file reports, and verbally abuse the research institution and its personnel, interfering with and disrupting the working order of the relevant unit and seriously affecting the normal work and life of the affected staff. According to an appraisal by the public security authorities, by the time the case was brought forward the relevant false videos had been played 545,054 times, reposted 1,245 times, and commented on 9,521 times”. (2025)

Based on the police briefing and the court verdict, the matter would seem to have been settled: the Memphis Zoo appears to have been vindicated, and the evidence indicates that the overseas panda Ya Ya was not abused. However, the subsequent developments were far from satisfactory. The Weibo hashtag #People’s Daily Commentary: Pandas Are Not a Clickbait Pool for Manufactured Lies# received only 158,000 views; its volumes of discussion, interaction, and original posts were all far lower than the levels of public attention generated during the rumors’ spread. In other words, the refutation was neither thorough nor comprehensive, some netizens even declared, “We will never again send our national treasure to the United States for Americans to abuse!”

In the next section, this study will combine the data collected in the present section and, drawing on the theoretical framework of sensemaking, examine the dissemination and discursive construction of rumors about pandas abroad within the context of great-power political competition.

Many scholars have advanced their own readings of sensemaking. Karl E. Weick’s work on organizational sensemaking (Weick, Sutcliffe, Obstfeld, 2005: 409–421) and Dave Snowden’s sensemaking within knowledge-management frameworks (Kurtz, Snowden, 2003: 462–483) conceive of sensemaking as a highly collaborative process that depends on intensive cooperation among social actors. Sensemaking is also understood as a learning process (Duncan, Printrich, Smith, Mckeachie, 2015), one shaped by individuals’ self-presentation, information-processing capacities (Gioia, Thomas, 1996), and empathic ability (Ibarra, Andrews, 1993: 277–303).

From this vantage, Dervin’s formulation exhibits certain limitations. Dervin posits that there is no overarching controlling force that produces a collective consciousness (Kolko, 2010); yet emotional contagion theory demonstrates that people can be automatically and unconsciously affected by others’ emotions, facilitating rapid, large-scale alignment of affective states (McDougall, 1923). Moreover, Louis Althusser argued that ideology operates in ways that are both covert and coercive, shaping subjects’ beliefs and dispositions through institutional mechanisms (Althusser, Li, 1987). Together, these perspectives suggest that individual experience may account for only a small portion of how cognitive gaps are bridged; instead, the reactions and attitudes of the broader public play the more enduring role in shaping audience meaning-construction (Fig. 4).

This study holds that, in the diffusion of rumor discourse, the mechanism individuals use to bridge cognitive gaps when confronted with a novel situation is sensemaking. This process is not determined solely by audiences’ personal experiences; rather, this study refines sensemaking theory by arguing that public evaluations and attitudes toward the incident exert a stronger influence on individual responses, thereby directing personal information-seeking, producing a spiral of silence, and ultimately generating a powerful collective consciousness that shapes judgments of the event.

Upon encountering the new information that “overseas pandas were abused”, the public experienced the emergence of a gap. Their shock at the news signaled a situational gap between the external environment and their internal cognition, marking a moment in which reality underwent a dynamic shift. News content featuring pandas as its central theme carries an inherently strong emotional appeal and affective impact: the image of the panda, which was a small, vulnerable, and emblematic of China, readily triggers public sympathy and anger. Against the backdrop of tense Sino-U.S. relations, these emotions were rapidly amplified, transforming into rumors with considerable influence and substantial potential for further dissemination.

Information “has value only when it is imbued with meaning” (Sualman & Jaafar, 2011), and that meaning depends primarily on the individual’s subjective interpretation. In the circulation of rumors, audiences often draw on their emotional inclinations and prior cognitive frameworks to associate constructed images, videos, and other media with the notion of “panda abuse”, thereby rendering such information seemingly credible. In the Ya Ya case, faced with complex and even contradictory information, the public was compelled to integrate and interpret it for themselves: when confronted with images of an aging Ya Ya with sparse fur, different individuals arrived at conclusions ranging from “she was abused” to “this is normal aging” depending on their existing biases.

This is a vivid manifestation of what Carl Hovland termed the Individual Differences Perspective in audience studies. Audiences make different choices and interpretations of information based on individual differences, and the degree of influence varies from person to person. While some aspects of these differences have genetic roots, they are shaped primarily by environmental factors, giving rise to what is known as “selective retention” and “selective perception”.

When encountering new information, individuals interpret it through the lens of their own life experiences and surrounding environment, subjectively framing its meaning. In the initial stage of the Ya Ya incident, audiences, who swayed by widely circulated images portraying her as “skin and bones”, readily concluded that she must have been “abused” at the Memphis Zoo. Meanwhile, much of the online discussion was one-sided and extreme in its condemnation of the zoo. Many audience members, relying on personal experience, selectively construed Ya Ya’s weight loss and coarse fur as definitive proof of abuse. While some may initially have adopted a wait-and-see attitude, observation of comments and replies, combined with their own subjective judgments, soon solidified the belief that abuse was an established fact, obviating the need for careful verification. Conversely, when authoritative bodies such as the China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda and Beijing Zoo issued factual statements on the matter, these were often dismissed due to entrenched preconceptions, as “unpatriotic” or “untrustworthy”.

Audience information-seeking is not a passive act of reception, but an active process of construction (Qiao & Zhou, 2007). In other words, audiences are not inert or defenseless in the face of mass media. When individuals perceive a cognitive gap, they actively search online and on social media for relevant clues, collecting user comments that broadly align with their own viewpoints in an attempt to fill the knowledge void. For example, after seeing photographs of Ya Ya, some netizens deliberately sought out related background materials and media commentary, piecing together disparate, fragmented information into an explanation that matched their pre-existing expectations.

In the present case, many audiences’ interests in the “panda abuse” narrative stemmed from emotional and identity-related needs. On one hand, their engagement was driven by the desire to vent anger at perceived injustices abroad, experience emotional resonance, or gain a sense of national identity—reflecting emotional and stress-relief needs. On the other hand, situating oneself within the narrative of “protecting the national treasure” fulfilled personal integrative needs. In other words, emotionally charged rumor content provided psychological gratification, making audiences more willing to consume and share such information, thereby fueling the rumor’s continued spread.

In the process of information dissemination, audiences actively choose what information to access in order to satisfy their personal needs. In other words, information-seeking is an active process aimed at fulfilling one’s own requirements. Netizens deliberately sought out rumors about Ya Ya’s “abuse” and expressed their own opinions to satisfy their needs for national identity and personal expression. When selecting information to engage with, audiences tend to prefer media and content consistent or aligned with their preexisting positions, viewpoints, and attitudes, while avoiding those that are inconsistent or oppositional (Baran & Davis, 2014), which is a phenomenon reflecting the audience’s psychological selection process.

Therefore, the significant impact of the Ya Ya abuse rumor largely stemmed from the public’s widespread participation in “uses and gratifications” behaviors to fill their cognitive gaps, which in turn amplified the scope of the rumor’s dissemination and accelerated the discursive construction of the event.

In the second level of agenda-setting: attribute agenda setting, China’s central media and other official outlets amplified attributes such as “Ya Ya gained weight after returning to China” as evidence of physical improvement, guiding netizens to focus on the contrast between Ya Ya’s “emaciated” appearance at the Memphis Zoo and her plumper figure at the Beijing Zoo. However, official media selectively overlooked the fact that weight gain in elderly pandas is not necessarily beneficial to their health, directing the entirety of public attention toward the narrative of Ya Ya’s physical recovery and thereby framing the focus of public discussion. Among these narratives, the trending hashtag #YaYaAppearsIncreasinglyPlump# garnered over 111.05 million views, overshadowing the reach of fact-checking efforts.

Considering the ideological context and the increasingly tense Sino-U.S. relations, Chinese official news media often engage in attribute agenda-setting to safeguard national interests. In this incident, the narrative around the Ya Ya rumor deliberately portrayed the panda as a “national symbol that had suffered great torment”, thereby arousing patriotic sentiment and resonating with the public’s nationalist emotions (Rogerson & Roselle, 2016). Official media, following agenda-setting and propaganda directives, emphasized positive narratives, highlighting that the panda had grown “as plump as two pandas” after returning home, to create an atmosphere of “positive energy”.

This promotional approach led many netizens who were unfamiliar with the actual facts of the incident to follow “mainstream media” in expressing their views and speaking out. At the same time, more people came to regard the “protecting Ya Ya” campaign as a reflection of their patriotic feelings, leaving the factual truth diminished in the face of irrational nationalist sentiment.

At the same time, some rational information and videos emerged, explicitly stating that Ya Ya had not been mistreated. However, a worse consequence was that those actively debunking the rumor were sometimes accused of “whitewashing” for the United States, leading to harassment by fans who had vowed to “protect Ya Ya”. The Bilibili animal content creator @paxingtianxia was among the most outspoken in refuting the rumor. In his final video on the matter, he openly stated that he had endured countless instances of online abuse and psychological pressure during this period. As of publication, the video had reached 993,000 views and sparked over 11,000 comments.

In the discussion surrounding this incident, rational voices were not absent—but they gradually faded from mainstream media spaces. According to the Spiral of Silence Theory, individuals’ perception of the prevailing opinion climate affects their willingness to speak out (Noelle-Neumann, 1984). Specifically, when people perceive their opinions as diverging from the mainstream, they tend to remain silent to avoid social isolation (Taylor, 1982).

In the online discourse around the “Ya Ya mistreatment” incident, emotionally charged, bandwagon viewpoints were often framed as the “mainstream” voice, while skeptical or fact-checking opinions were viewed as minority positions, making them more prone to silence. As a result, rational perspectives were less likely to be expressed. This created a discursive environment in which more emotional, inflammatory statements dominated the public stage, further amplifying the rumor’s momentum and accelerating the spread of false information.

Netizens attempting to share factual, rational content instead faced heavy online abuse and extreme threats, hastening the silencing of truthful information. Consequently, the silence of one side’s opinion strengthened the momentum of the opposing view, entering a spiral process in which one dominant opinion became further entrenched and established as the prevailing narrative, while alternative perspectives disappeared entirely from the public sphere, remaining “unspoken”.

By analyzing the case through the lens of sensemaking theory, this study finds that audiences continually construct bridges of meaning between their real-world perceptions and the gaps in available information. In situations where information is incomplete and heavily subjective, people tend to fill those gaps with interpretations aligned with their emotional and cognitive expectations, thereby imbuing rumors with new layers of meaning and persuasive power.

In other words, emotionally charged content, when situated in a particular context, can exert broad influence over audiences. At the same time, in the interplay between active information processing and the surrounding environment, audiences form interpretations and engage in rumor-spreading behaviors. They construct meaning between fragmented reality and emotional preconceptions, and, under the combined pressures of public opinion and personal psychological needs, the subjective narrative of “panda mistreatment” gains influence and circulates widely within that specific context.

The event unfolded against the backdrop of increasingly tense Sino-U.S. relations, in which Chinese public sentiment toward the U.S. was markedly hostile. This, combined with the hype from official and social media platforms, rapidly amplified the topic and generated broad, sustained influence. On the other hand, during the rumor-refuting process, police did not provide a detailed account of the causes and context, resulting in an incomplete clarification whose effects failed to eliminate the rumor’s impact. Stakeholders such as Beijing Zoo and the China Association of Zoological Gardens defended the actions of the U.S. side only in closed-door meetings, while continuing to publicly emphasize the contrast between Ya Ya’s post-return life in China and her time at Memphis Zoo.

Based on the above analysis, this study argues that the “Ya Ya mistreatment” rumor generated a huge impact primarily due to the interplay of emotional resonance and nationalist sentiment. Panda-themed content inherently carries strong emotional appeal; the image of a frail panda easily triggers public sympathy and anger. Against the tense backdrop of Sino-U.S. relations, these emotions were rapidly amplified. Opinion data show that panda-related topics surged to trending status before and after Ya Ya’s return, with search volumes and view counts spiking. Some studies argue that the varying approaches adopted by the media in news reporting are underpinned by their underlying ideologies and socio-political contexts (Pei, Li, Cheng, 2022), and are further shaped by the “implicit editorial policies” within editorial departments (Sing, Yao, Gill, 2022; Breed, 1955), both quantitative and qualitative evidence indicate that the prevailing narratives were deeply embedded in nationalist discourse and distrust of the West.

Some studies indicate that news content can significantly shape audience attitudes, particularly during the early stages of opinion formation (Ash, Galletta, Hangartner, Margalit, Pinna, 2024; Djourelova, 2023). Other research, however, suggests that even substantial changes in the information environment do not necessarily produce attitude change (Berk, 2025). Changes in Sino-U.S. relations have substantially affected news-content agendas. Scholars have noted a strong correlation between press freedom and political liberalization, and that this correlation has, overall, shifted toward audience demand (Norris, Inglehart, 2009). In other words, the increasing frequency of negative coverage of the United States in China is unlikely to be primarily the result of deliberate strategies by propaganda authorities, actions by the U.S. government, or journalists’ personal attitudes; rather, audience attitudes and the content audiences wish to see play a more decisive role (Stockmann, 2013). Some researchers argue that, in China, anti-foreign sentiment and ethnocentrism can be effective means of sustaining audience attention and engagement (Kinder, Kam, 2009). It follows that the content provided by malicious rumor makers, together with audiences’ affective needs and group norms, jointly shape the ultimately dominant discursive system.

The construction of rumor discourse reflects the joint influence of deliberate manipulation and audience construction. Some individual-run social-media accounts and commercial clickbait accounts, driven by traffic and profit motives, actively fabricated and disseminated abuse rumors.

In the following section, the study will concentrate on rational-discussion: oriented solutions for the public, seeking to propose measures within mass media to strengthen the public’s capacity to assess and discuss facts rationally.