"China's 9/11": A comparative study of Xinhua and Western coverage of the Kunming Railway incident of March 1, 2014 (original) (raw)
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Through a comparative framing analysis of print media coverage of the Kunming Railway Station incident in March 2014, this article examines the Chinese state media’s attempted projection of a “new” China to the outside world. This projection is occurring in the context of the nation’s changing international status as the result of its rapid economic rise. It is observed that by calling this incident a terror attack and even “China’s 9/11”, and by reporting condemnations and condolences from other countries China clearly identifies itself as a victim of terror and expresses a strong wish to be recognized as a member of the mainstream international community. It is argued that Xinhua’s projection of China in its coverage reflects a new national identity China is trying to develop, while legitimizing its crackdown on Uyghur “terrorists”. However, the comparison with elite media sources in the West shows that Western governments and media may be reluctant to embrace China fully as a new member of the “international community”. While the Chinese government attempted to use the incident as a way of leveraging its position and status within the “international community” and Xinhua supported this aim, the Western media appears to have quickly forgotten the incident and not to have supported China’s claims.
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Loss of identity is a leading cause of terrorism and a common bewilderment of Mainland China and Taiwan. Cutting into the research by the news representation of Chinese terrorism incidents, this paper discusses a special identity issue in a special identity history. This paper adopts mixed methods, which are constructed by content analysis, framing discourses and frequency statistics. 111 pieces of related news are selected and doubly-coded into both "identity package" and "news framing". The results show that the news representations interconnect with the coexisting identity and confrontation between Mainland China and Taiwan.
The Chinese vs Western Media Framing on Uygur Conflict
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This paper focuses on the Uyghur conflict, which became international news. Many reports about the Uygur appear with religious-based heroic narratives that corroborate discrimination, persecution, and the Chinese government's mistake against the Uyghur ethnic minority. It aims to understand the difference in Western mass media's preaching compared to the Chinese mass media informing Uyghur-related news. Compared to other ethnicity issues, the authors believed in specific interests behind the preaching of various online mass media to what was happening in Xinjiang. The authors used the explanative method with the framework of the framing theory of Pan Konciski and the constructivist paradigm to interpret the news of the Uygur conflict. The study results show Western media are more likely to use words or sentences that drain the reader's emotions, while Chinese media are more likely to be neutral in framing the news. It is a record for the authors that the public perception regarding the internationalization of issues occurring in a country can be influenced by how the media package news content.
The terrorist attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on 7th January 2015 received extensive media coverage in Europe, creating a discussion that mainly revolved around the issues of terrorism and press freedom. The Chinese media also paid attention to the event, and this study, based on analysis of a corpus of news commentaries published in the aftermath of the attack, highlights the discursive features of the positions on the Charlie Hebdo case of two Chinese language papers, the party-run Huanqiu Shibao and the market-oriented Xinjingbao. A qualitative and quantitative approach has been used to identify relevant themes and to measure the frequency of related terms. The research question is whether news commentaries expressed a plurality of views on a controversial subject such as freedom of speech in China. The results show that the case has generally been used to reinforce the official discourse on both terrorism and press freedom. However, while Huanqiu Shibao’s news commentaries failed to perform the genre’s purpose to voice independent opinions, some Xinjingbao’s articles were able to present original viewpoints. This can be considered a sign that some debate is possible in China even on highly controversial topics, and that the writers of commentaries, who often are freelancers, play a key role in widening the discussion in the country’s media sphere.
Social realities are discursive constructs, so that attitudes and representations are the reflection of an informative approach. In this sense, the cultural and linguistic gaps between different civilizations, together with a discursive construction of a war nature, could be creating the ground for a continuous confrontation between East and West. The present study analyzes the different rhetorical frames of the international news agencies Reuters, Al Arabiya, Al Jazeera and Associated Press about the terrorist attack at the Istanbul (Turkey) airport on July 28, 2016. A quantitative study of the figures speech and the most repeated topics in the headlines of the attack is carried out. The power of the media in public opinion and the construction of reality generate a discussion about how these news are spread and their effects. The objective is to compare the different rhetorical frames in both civilizations and to identify if stereotypes are projected and if this framing contributes to the spectacularization of the conflict. The main result is that there are no significant discursive differences, which leads to the conclusion that east-west rhetorical figures are used to produce a certain effect in the population, among those that highlight the euphemisms, dysphemisms, demonization and discursive polarization, resources that serve to emphasize fear and create even larger gaps of social significance.
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Chinese Media Framing of the Muslim in the 2009 Urumqi Riot
The bulk of academic debates has centred on the media representation of Muslims in the Western context. A generic framework shows that Muslim figures have been repeatedly stereotyped, stigmatised, and terrorised by the Western media coverage, especially since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 (Morey & Yaqin 2011: 18). However, a dearth of research discusses media representation of Muslims outside the Western scholarship. This case study is of critical significance in terms of filling this gap. It endeavours to investigate how the mainstream Chinese news media construct the representational tropes of the Chinese-Muslims, through drawing upon the case study of 7/5 Urumqi riot. This case study contends that Chinese media discourse shows similarities but also differences with the Western media narratives, in regards to constructing stereotypical images of Muslims. It further argues that media stereotyping of Uyghur-Muslims perpetuates the intensification of inter-ethnic relationships between Uyghur and Han people. What kind of nuances can be found in Chinese media representation of Muslims in the post-riot reports in 2009 in Urumuqi.
Representing the 'Other': The Framing of China in BBC English and Urdu Online News
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Having established its economic power globally, China is now also asserting its soft power in the international symbolic representational realm-largely dominated by the West. This paper critically evaluates how BBC discursively constructs China in its Online English and Urdu News, and discusses its attendant social, political, and economic implications for the Chinese and Pakistani citizens in particular, and for people all over the world. We also discuss how does the West perceive China's efforts to establish a global soft image and what role BBC plays in it. Using a combination of research tools; Framing, Authorship and Sourcing, the study analyzed 115 news stories. The analysis revealed that 'China-Threat' is the dominant frame in BBC's coverage of China. Second, all stories were written by correspondents stationed outside China. Finally, BBC disproportionately cited Western news/expert sources, and also many sources/reports were unspecified (anonymous). The aim of this paper is to prompt readers to question commonly held assumptions of China propagated mostly by Western media.
Chinese narratives on 2015 terrorist attack in France
Franco-Korean Workshop Rennes Institute of Political Studies, 2018
The idea of this modest study about Chinese media narratives of the recent terrorist attacks in France dates back a few days after the Charlie-Hebdo mass killing by the Kouachi brothers on January the seven two thousands fifteen. I had to give a course on Chinese history and I thought that I couldn't avoid to talk about those events with my students. However, I didn't know how to talk about it with them. I faced this tragedy as a human being and a citizen like them, not a teacher. I didn't want to give them any lesson, to tell them what to think about it. Plus, It was a course about China, which has nothing to do with France. So, I found that it could be interesting for them and for me to have a decentered reading of those attacks. We were, in France, at the heart of the events, submerged not only by feelings and emotions but also by a continuous flow of images and discourses about those crimes. So, I found interesting to take a step aside by reading and analyzing what the Chinese press had to say about those attacks. Another reason of the pertinence of a decentered reading