Political and Media Systems Matter: U.S., Chinese, and British Press Coverage of China's Rise, 2008-2014

This study seeks to compare how leading newspapers in the U.S., Britain, and China "frame" the rise of China from 2008 to 2014. In the wake of global financial crisis, China’s emergence as a world power has been greeted internationally both as a threat and as an opportunity. By focusing on comparative frames, we examine both the media-system contrasts in news-making and the differences attributable to ideologies operating within the press in each country. Our findings suggest that the newspapers within each country provide a diversity of frames and the intra-national differences in Chinese media landscape are most distinct. Nevertheless, such intra-national differences in press discourses are less significant than between-country differences. Methodologically, we aim at contributing to comparative research of media framing by proposing to combine computer-based corpus linguistics approach with constructionist approach to discourse analysis that makes analysis of large data-sets possible.