Three angles of viewing China's in-waiting new leader: News framing within ideology boundaries

The Greater China area provides a unique context for studying news framing. Although geographically close and cultural proximate, Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan are actually in stark contrast in terms of ideology controls. Representing not free, partly free and free media system respectively, these three regions’ news frames are worth researching to observe the developments of professional journalism in different social conditions, such as social systems and degree of political sensitivity. Under this circumstance, media produce different news stories about the same event, especially when the event is political sensitive. This study compared newspaper coverage of the three regions on China’s Vice President Xi Jinping’s diplomatic visits from February 13rd to February 23rd. The in-waiting new leader of China and his ten days’ visits to the US, Turkey and Ireland have been differently criticized and interpreted by global media, such as presuccession diplomatic preview or presenting new generation leadership of PRC to the world, and both the leadership changes in the Chinese Central Government and Sino-US relationship development are in the concern of the whole world. Considering “One Country, two systems” is operated in Hong Kong’s postcolonial era and is regarded by Chinese Communist Party as a way to deal with the future relationship between Taiwan and Mainland China, how media in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China frame Xi’s visits is worth studying. Framing analysis would be conducted in terms of news selection, favorability toward the in-waiting China’s new leader, sourcing pattern, and overall news perspective. Objective of the research would be to test the hypothesis of different news frames exerted by news media in the three regions, and answering the research question of how Xi Jinping’s visit were framed in each of these regions. Different news frames in the coverage would be explored and interpreted in the context of ideology, news freedom variation and professional journalism. Content analysis would be applied in this study to analyze a total of 82 newspapers, 279 news articles. Those samples were obtained from WiseNews database, which is commonly agreed as a best dataset among researchers of China media. News were searched and selected by the criterion of “keyword (“Xi Jinping & the US” “Xi Jinping & Turkey” “Xi Jinping & Ireland”) ‘in headline’”. Theoretical implications for future research would be discussed.