The Impact of the News Frames on Report of the 2020 Pandemic in China’s National Media

News frames is a general application of the Frame Theory in journalistic practice, and the setting of the Frame Theory in news media, to some extent, may make the news agency have more choices of the topics, more channels of the report, and more impacts on readers and audiences. It is for this reason that news media are very interested in setting up their news frame to guide their reportage. It won’t be surprised that when important affairs took place, the media set a theme for their coverage; while at the same time, audiences recognized that they are allowed to know the facts as well to evaluate the events properly. The coverage of disaster news is one of the concrete examples. However, when reading the reportage framework of the news in China, it can be seen that media would be likely to set similar frames for the focus of the report, and this potentially created complexity and difficulty in analyzing disaster news events in terms of content classification, reporting form, and news-making on effectiveness. The outbreak of the 2020 COVID-19 gathered media to work on a centralized proposal – anti-epidemic, so that textual, audio-visual contents and other forms of reporting show a diversified perspective for disaster news. This reporting from is a new challenge for Chinese news media, reflected in their practice on how Chinese government and people fought against the virus, how Chinese medical community dispatched their team to assist COVID-19 fight, and how Chinese media responded to the vilification of foreign media during that period. This paper takes three established media Hubei Daily, CCTV and China Daily as examples for an in-depth analysis.

Critical Analysis and Identity Construction of Chinese News Media from Transitivity Perspective

As the disseminator of information, news media play a vital role in the public speech community. Especially the mainstream English media in China, which not only carefully design the topic, content, and framework of news to broadcast information but also construct cultural identity and build China’s image. Exemplified by a piece of news from China Daily, the present study analyzes its language features and function of transitivity system based on the theory of transitivity, and attempts to explore its implicit meaning and cultural identity beyond the literal text.

The Doklam Standoff Revisited: A Content Examination of Sino-Indian Media

The research aimed to find the cues that Indian and Chinese news media gave to indicate that they had an agenda on Doklam standoff. It was further augmented with evaluation of China threat notion and attempts to create illusory truth effect in the news content. By executing content analysis, it was discerned that both Indian and Chinese news media hosted all the cues confirming that they had a pre-defined agenda on the coverage of Doklam standoff and that the agenda was bestowed on the media by the government. While Xinhua had an agenda to repeatedly justify China’s position on Doklam and highlight the possibilities of war by shifting the onus of the same on India, PTI had an agenda to give space to voices of all parties involved, to repeatedly restate the negative implications of standoff and all the threats it was getting from China. The findings not only suggested what was explicit in the news agenda, but also indicated the implicit or the undesirable; thus, it was found that both Indian and Chinese news media besides advancing their agenda were even contingently confirming to the notions of China threat theory and were attempting to create an illusory truth effect.

Climate change in China: A study of news diversity in party-sponsored and market-oriented newspapers

Chinese news publications potentially play a crucial role in mitigating global climate change. Presently, the majority of scholars treat the Chinese news media system as one single entity. We expect, however, Chinese party-sponsored and market-oriented newspapers differ in their representation of climate change. Using the conceptual framework of news diversity, we examined how Chinese journalists reported on climate change by examining their use of media frames, source types, and multiple viewpoints in news articles. The results revealed that market-oriented newspapers were indeed significantly different by including more diverse viewpoints, conflict frames, and environmental nongovernmental organizational sources, while party-sponsored newspapers employed more domestic political, science, and scientific uncertainty frames. The results suggest that researchers should be cautious about generalizing past findings to the entire Chinese media ecosystem because it is unique, diverse, and complex.

Chinese News Media Discourse of Doulas and Doula Care

This article highlights the relationships among Chinese society, the discourse about doulas and doula care in childbirth, and Chinese women. The author used a critical feminist lens to analyze the discourse about doulas, doula care in childbirth, and women in Chinese mainstream news media. This analysis showed that the Chinese news media and government encouraged and promoted becoming a doula as a profession and doula care in labor in terms of cultural, social, and political factors. An argument was presented that these discourses obscure a nuanced understanding of Chinese women’s maternal health in general.

When London Hit the Headlines: Historical Analogy and the Chinese Media Discourse on Air Pollution

This article analyses how Chinese media make sense of smog and air pollution in China through the lens of London's past. Images of London, the fog city, have figured in the Chinese press since the 1870s, and this collective memory has made London a powerful yet malleable tool for discursive contestation on how to frame China's current air pollution problem, which constitutes part of news media's hegemonic and counter-hegemonic practices. Although the classic images of London as a fog city persist to the present day, the new narrative centres on the 1952 Great Smog, which was rediscovered and mobilized by Chinese news media to build an historical analogy. In invoking this foreign past, official media use London to naturalize the smog problem in China and justify the official stance, while commercialized media emphasize the bitter lessons to be learned and call for government action.

Financialisation of news in China in the age of the Internet: the case of Xinhuanet

This article discusses the recent development of Xinhuanet.com , a news website launched by Xinhua News Agency, one of China’s key central state-owned news organisations. Xinhuanet Co. Ltd, the business entity running the website, went public in October 2016 in Shanghai. This marked the first step in the state news agency’s financialisation. Two main questions are addressed. First, what were the main driving forces behind Xinhuanet’s transformation from a governmental cultural organisation to a publicly traded enterprise, the majority shareholder of which remains Xinhua? Second, how should the nature of this transformation be understood, in relation to Xinhua’s wider marketisation process and that of the Chinese media sector as a whole? The article argues that Xinhua’s financialisation via Xinhuanet is best understood as part of a state-administrated initiative in accord with Xinhua’s own business ambitions. The financialisation of news by state players such as Xinhuanet does not alter the underlying ownership structure of Chinese news media, which remain ultimately state-controlled.