HOW DOES CHINA VIEW “THE WEST”? 1 How does China view “the West”?: A Content Analysis of Foreign News Coverage of CCTV’s Xinwen Lianbo Xiaodong Zhang 11896655 Master’s Thesis Graduate School of Communication Master’s Program Communication Science Dr. Mark Boukes (Supervisor) University of Amsterdam May, 2018 HOW DOES CHINA VIEW “THE WEST”? 2 Abstract The current study investigates how Xinwen Lianbo, a prestigious TV news program and a key propaganda tool of the Chinese Communist Party, framed a bloc of Western countries in its early 2010s’ foreign news coverage. The results of a content analysis revealed a mixed and diverse image of the West as portrayed by the program. Interestingly, since Xi Jinping took office in late 2012, more negative frames of these countries were identified, signaling a pivotal moment in terms of China’s foreign policy. Xi’s speech to Chinese media workers in August 19, 2013, on the other hand, did not make an additional impact on the program’s framing of the West. Key Words: frame, China, Western countries, Xinwen Lianbo HOW DOES CHINA VIEW “THE WEST”? 3 Introduction Unlike domestic news, foreign news is not directly connected to an audience’s daily life. When newspapers and television report a story of a foreign and distant land, audiences often find themselves unable to fact-check the story by simply recalling their knowledge base and first-hand experience (Entman, 2004; Lim & Seo, 2009). For ordinary audiences, the truth and facts behind an ongoing international event are often intangible and difficult to comprehend. Their perceptions of a certain foreign country, therefore, are heavily influenced by their government and the domestic media’s framing of it. In Ball-Rokeach and DeFleur’s (1976) media dependency theory, it was said that such media coverage could cast impacts on audiences at cognitive, affective, and behavioral levels. For instance, when American media covered Iraq back in 2003, they successfully had many audiences believe that a country somewhere in the Middle East was developing weapons of mass destruction which could endanger the US’s national security, even though the narrative was later proven to be false (Moeller, 2004). In the case of China, the government and media’s power in shaping public opinion toward foreign countries is arguably even more salient. Unlike Western democracies, China’s lack of press freedom means the Chinese media, on most occasions, are bound to report international events under the propaganda department’s guidance with very little room for alternative interpretations (Shambaugh, 2007). Furthermore, the public also have limited choices of news reporting channels; this is especially considering the existence of “the Great Fire Wall”, which cuts off the Chinese public’s access to global internet. For a considerable share of the Chinese public, especially those who live in rural areas, Chinese official media are the only channels with which to be informed about international society and from which to form an opinion on countries belonging to “the West.” HOW DOES CHINA VIEW “THE WEST”? 4 In the past, Western media’s framing of China has yielded quite some insightful findings and unveiled some similar patterns, such as the enduring “friend vs. enemy” frame (Stone & Xiao, 2007; Golan & Lukito, 2015; Ooi & D’Arcangelis, 2018). Chinese media’s framing of Western countries, however, has not yet been fully explored by academia. Among all Chinese media, China Central Television’s (CCTV) daily primetime news program Xinwen Lianbo (新闻联播, literally “News Simulcast”) is undoubtedly the most dominant channel for international news dissemination. The present study intents to investigate Xinwen Lianbo’s framing of Western countries in recent years by conducting a content analysis, and answer the following research question: How did Chinese official media (CCTV's Xinwen Lianbo) frame "The West" in the beginning of the 21st century Derived from Vremya, of Soviet Central Television, Xinwen Lianbo is an extremely important propaganda tool of the Chinese Communist Party. In its framing of “The West,” it is able to represent the official voices of the Chinese leadership. Claiming an average daily viewership of as many as 135 million (The Economist, 2016), Xinwen Lianbo also has a strong penetration rate among the Chinese public, as many viewers, especially those from rural areas, heavily rely on it as their sole channel for keeping in touch with current affairs. Since its debut on January 1st, 1978, CCTV’s Xinwen Lianbo has been the most influential television news program in China: Not only do CCTV’s own channels air the show at 19:00 daily, all provincial TV stations in China are obliged to also air it simultaneously, making Xinwen Lianbo virtually the only choice for Chinese audiences who want to watch TV news during the time period of 19:00 and 19:30. A study of Xinwen Lianbo’s framing of “The West”, therefore, has the potential to reveal Chinese leadership’s attitudes towards the Western world and, consequently, how the Chinese public probably views the rest of the world. HOW DOES CHINA VIEW “THE WEST”? 5 Theoretical framework Studying frames and framing has long been an enduring and conventional approach in communication research. Different from agenda-setting, framing deals with the next stage of news production, as it is a process which handles “the presentation of issues” (De Vreese, 2005, p. 53), which influences how the public perceives and interprets a certain fact. In the case of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, different media outlets employed drastically different frames (attacks by the Republicans vs. responses by the Democrats) to interpret the same event, which directly or indirectly affected their viewers’ attitudes towards the U.S. President (Shah, Watts, Domke, & Fan, 2002). When conducting a media content analysis, framing helps to understand how media contents could potentially have an impact on the attitudes and behavior of viewers (Chong & Druckman, 2007). Entman (1993, p. 52) defined framing as “the process of selecting some aspects of a perceived reality and making them more salient in a communicating text.” Entman also proposed four major functions of framing, which are “defining problems, diagnosing causes, making moral judgments, and suggesting remedies.” De Vreese (2005), similarly, defined framing as a process of emphasizing the importance of different aspects within a topic. More importantly, he identified two phases of framing: frame-building and frame-setting, which correspond to how a frame is chosen and produced in the newsroom and how the frame is eventually delivered to and interacts with the audiences. In the context of the Western media industry, many scholars believe the phase of frame-building is a joint-effort constructed by multiple players, such as journalists, editors, politicians and even audiences (Entman, 2004), during which every player holds and exerts their individual influences on how a frame is selected and produced. For instance, journalists can write the texts according to personal preferences and interpretations; editors can delete and modify the contents into the narrative he or she likes; and investors and advertisers can HOW DOES CHINA VIEW “THE WEST”? 6 steer their influences on the content by applying pressure from outside (McManus, 1995). In fact, the perception which believes that different roles can all play a part in this process is also in correspondence with the hierarchy of influences model proposed by Shoemaker and Reese (1996), which categorized a system of powers that can steer the production of media contents. In China, its lack of press freedom has made such an open and competing frame- building process not always applicable, especially in terms of a top state-owned media outlet such as CCTV. Despite its marketization and commercialization in the past decades, media in China are still highly regulated by the government to date. Studies that focused on contemporary Chinese media system have argued that, for high-profile Chinese media institutions, namely the “big three” (Xinhua News Agency, People’s Daily, and CCTV), political propaganda tasks remain to be their primary daily objective (Winfield & Peng, 2005; Shambaugh, 2007). These top state-owned media normally are directly-owned and funded by the Chinese central government, and accordingly serve no other purposes than acting as the mouth-pieces of the Party and the government. These media’s special status imply that their frame-building process are often not conducted in a dynamic arena or a public town hall, but in a back chamber where only Party elites are present. For instance, in the recent event of Xi’s constitution amendment to abolish his term limits, only the party-approved frame that describes the decision as “positive progress” seemed to be allowed, while alternative frames and interpretations were seriously underrepresented in the Chinese media (Al Jazeera, 2018). As a flagship news program of CCTV, Xinwen Lianbo’s frame-building process has also been predominantly influenced by Communist Party elites (Shambaugh, 2007). The propaganda guidance from the Party and the government, consequently, shapes the contents of this program from an ideological and extra-media level on a daily basis. As such, an HOW DOES CHINA VIEW “THE WEST”? 7 effective message delivery channel from the Communist Party to the public via Xinwen Lianbo has been formed. Meanwhile, the show’s significant viewership base and its officially-granted monopoly on the 19:00 Chinese