Their floods and Our floods: News values of flood photo galleries of Associated Press and Xinhua News Agency

This study investigates how floods are presented as newsworthy in the photo galleries of Associated Press (AP) and Xinhua News Agency (Xinhua), two news outlets with different cultural and political backgrounds. A distinction is made between international floods, that is, Their floods, and domestic floods, that is, Our floods. The data consists of around 1500 photo-caption complexes. The analysis adopts the framework of Discursive News Values Analysis. The findings show a similar tendency to highlight Negativity, Impact, Personalization and Superlativeness in presenting Their floods by AP and Xinhua, though the two differ in Proximity and Positivity. By contrast, Our floods are presented differently. Negativity, Impact and Personalization are foregrounded in AP’s presentation of floods in the United States, whereas Xinhua’s presentation of floods in China gives prominence to Negativity, Positivity, Personalization and Superlativeness. The study is significant for its attention to cross-cultural comparison and the genre of online photo galleries.

Urbanization in China: Through the City Construction in Qingming Scroll and the Proposition of New-Type Urbanization

In the 2019 Government Work Report of The State Council[1], Prime Minister of the People’s Republic of China, Li Keqiang, stressed the need to “promote coordinated regional development and improve the quality of new-type urbanization.” The Government Work Report of The State Council in May 2020 puts forward the basic principles of strengthening the new-type urbanization and improving the capacity of public service facilities[2]. (Xinhua News Agency [XNA], 2020). It is necessary to promote sustainable and livable urbanization. What should urbanization be like in the case of the new type as a crucial task of construction? How should it deepen the reform of the household registration system and promote economic development beyond the population balance of cities? Based on city clusters, how should urbanization further be promoted and comprehensively driven the Chinese economy after the epidemic? Will the "street stall economy" and "small shop economy" jointly proposed by the Central Civilization Office and Prime Minister in 2020 be a new opportunity? By reviewing Urbanization in China (2019) written by Houkai Wei, this paper believes that Qingming Scroll, as an observable example of the economic prosperity of the Northern Song Dynasty, can be a breakthrough in the analysis of the new-type urbanization. Taking the urbanization of the Northern Song Dynasty shown in Qingming Scroll as a base, this paper will further give a new answer on how to further develop and improve the new urbanization. Based on the analysis of the national urbanization of Bianjing in the Northern Song Dynasty shown and the process given by Urbanization in China, this paper further speculates and constructs the possibility of development. Therefore, according to the characteristics of cities and the nature of urban development in the Northern Song Dynasty, this paper tries to analyze the structure of urbanization in New China and discusses feasible new ways of the urban economy.[1] Li, Keqiang. (2019). Report on the Work of the Government of the State Council.[2] Xinhua News Agency. (2020). Report on the Work of the Government for 2020.

COVID-19 news reporting and engaging in the age of social media: Comparing Xinhua News Agency and The Paper

“To follow and to be followed” has become the new normal in news communication in the age of social media. News audience follow news via social media while they are being followed by news anytime anywhere. This new normal has created a pressing need to investigate whether social media have brought any changes to both party-controlled and market-oriented news media in China in reporting crises. Comparing Xinhua News Agency (party-controlled) and The Paper (market-oriented), this study investigated how they reported COVID-19 and how their news consumers engaged with their COVID-19 news stories on Jinri Toutiao, a popular and yet special form of social media. This study found that Xinhua News Agency continued to stay overwhelmingly positive, while The Paper was more neutral in reporting the health crisis. Xinhua News Agency was surprisingly more episodic than The Paper in framing the pandemic. The Paper, however, had a higher level of user engagement than Xinhua News Agency. To cater to the changing news-seeking behaviors and patterns, both party-controlled and market-oriented news media have changed their operations, but not their fundamental orientations.

Regional differences in mainland China after the 1970s economic reform

Relevance. In recent years, China’s GDP has continued to grow, however, the regional gap in socio-economic development is still huge. It is, therefore, crucial to investigate the reasons behind regional disparities and the possible solutions to this problem. Research objective. This paper aims to examine the patterns of regional differences in mainland China after the economic reform of the 1970s. Data and methods. The study relies on the methods of comparative analysis and the data from the National Bureau of Statistics of the People’s Republic of China and the Statistical Yearbook Sharing Platform as well as the information from the national media portal - Xinhua News Agency. Results. The Chinese government’s application of differentiated measures, strategies and policies to different regions exacerbated the existing disparities. This paper elaborates on the future regional economic adjustments and plans and thus can be of interest to investors and business activists in China and other countries.

Neologisms in socio-political texts in Chinese during the coronavirus (covid-19) pandemic

This article examines neologisms that emerged in the Chinese language during the coronavirus pandemic. Any changes taking place in society are primarily reflected in social and political media, therefore, news publications in influential Chinese media (People's Daily, Xinhua News Agency, Guangming Daily) were selected as the research material because these sources enjoy the confidence among people. The aim of the research is to determine the building patterns and usage of neologisms that appeared during the period of 6–8 months since the pandemic outbreak. About 500 articles discussing coronavirus were analyzed in the course of the work, as a result, more than 30 neologisms were identified. In this paper, we present a detailed analysis of 10 most frequent neologisms found in 289 contexts. It was discovered that compounding was the most frequent neologism-building pattern (60%), additional connotation acquisition turned out twice less frequent (30%), and the rarest pattern was homophony (10%).

DISTURBANCES IN VERNACULAR ARCHITECTURE OF TOGO'S RURAL SETTLEMENTS

According to the United Nations (UN) Africa accounts for only 13% of the world's urban population and less than half of the inhabitants of this continent (43%) live in urban areas (Xinhua News Agency, 2017). Therefore, the cultural importance of rural architecture in this context is remarkable both locally for each society and generally for human knowledge. As Paul Oliver pointed out, vernacular architecture is the architectural language of people with their ethnic, regional and local dialects (Oliver, 1997), and it should be considered a treasure containing the knowledge, development and progress of a civilization. The formal and material results of this development lead to the reopening of the debate on its sustainability and its effects on human behaviour. The structural changes of rural habitats are putting the preservation of their cultural heritage at serious risk. The current demand for habitability fosters the use of imported materials such as cement and sheet metal to replace earthen walls and straw roofing in the simple constructions, solutions that deceptively improve the comfort of the inhabited spaces. The present article analyses residential construction typologies of traditional rural settlements of Togo, where the constructive, formal and technical variety is replaced by general solutions that, without achieving the desired housing improvement, are nonetheless contributing to the social detachment from traditions that represent the cultural identity of each community. The methodology aims at the identification and characterization of traditional residential typologies, and a final consideration evaluates the balance between sustainable development and the conservation of cultural values in rural settlements.

Transcultural political communication from the perspective of proximization theory: A comparative analysis on the corpuses of the Sino–US trade war

Previous studies have shown the operational potential in political discourse analysis from the proximization perspective. This study adopts a cross-disciplinary approach to analyze political communication across transcultural contexts, especially in the cyber discourse space. Based on the spatial–temporal–axiological (STA) model, we compare the journalistic discourses on two social media platforms by China Xinhua News Agency (CXNA), an official speaker for China worldwide. The corpuses are constructed with microblogs on Weibo in Chinese and Twitter in English containing key words of Sino–US trade war. It is found that the speaker has shaped different realities of discourse in accordance with the cultural contexts and proximized from corresponding dimensions to increase political legitimacy.