Framing the Rise of China: How States, Markets, and Globalization Shape Foreign News in the U.S., French and British Press

This project seeks to compare how leading newspapers across the ideological spectrum in three major western countries—namely, the U.S., Britain, and France—“frame” the rise of China from 2001 to the present. In the post-cold war, neoliberal global order, China’s emergence as a world power has been greeted internationally both as a threat and as an opportunity. We seek to “detotalize” the “western” press by empirically evaluating media frames from three countries (the U.S., Britain, France) on one issue (China’s rise). If the U.S. media embody the liberal model and the French media represent the “polarized pluralist model,” the British media can be characterized as a liberal model with polarized pluralist elements. Furthermore, the rise of China may present markedly different national interest considerations for the U.S., Britain, and France. By focusing on comparative frames, we shall examine both the media-system contrasts in international news-making and the differences attributable to ideologies operating within the press in each country. It is often assumed that international news coverage is “indexed” to the vantage points of national interest, as crystallized by foreign policy. We shall be able to test this hypothesis across three countries. Moreover, we would like to examine how the enduring “cultural repertoires” in the three countries play out in the shaping of press prisms. We hope to contribute to the advancement of international communication studies by systematically assessing press frames across national contexts, and by seriously engaging with media theories that attempt to account for the relationship between press frames and national interest. We also seek to enhance policy understanding by investigating how “opinion leaders” in the western press interpret the significance and implications of China’s rise to each of their countries and to the global system in general.