China's Global Media Influence

• In Event: Political Communication Across Asia

Abstract

There is increasing concern over China’s global influence, and in particular its influence on the politics and society of democratic societies. Although China has not sought to interfere in democratic elections or inflame democratic polarization the way Russia has done, China is intervening globally with more resources and across a wider range of sector than Russia. In this paper, we compare Chinese media coverage of President Donald Trump and Premier Xi Jinping in the US-China trade war to US media coverage of these leaders in order to identify whether narratives originating in Chinese state-controlled media disseminate into US media and vice versa. This paper leverages multimodal data from Twitter media accounts, Sina Weibo media accounts, newspapers, and news broadcasts. We analyze narratives found in Chinese and English media texts as well as visual narratives and tone conveyed in images. We show how narrative vary by the source of the text and images, the sub-national location of the source, as well as over time.

Authors

• Jennifer Pan, Stanford University

• Jungseock Joo, UCLA

• Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld, University of California - Los Angeles