Protests in China have always drawn attentions from the globe. In 2010, ‘China was rocked by 180,000 protests, riots and other mass incidents – more than four times the tally from a decade earlier’ (Orlik, 2011)[1]. Though with national and regional censorship, Steinhardt’s study (2015)[2] in Asian Studies Review shows that protests in China have become not merely more frequent, but also a great deal more visible. This study will analyse how major international news organisations—CNN, NBC and BBC, cover protests in China and will seek to evaluate the characterisation of news about Wukan and Hong Kong protests. The aim of the research is to critically discuss global news coverage of non-Western issues, investigate historical and contemporary debates about global news representations, and critically investigate the implications of the news coverage of Chinese protests in relation to geopolitics.
In the era of decreasing credibility of media, international news reports about China, especially political riots have been accused of being biased by Chinese government and some Chinese audience. The study reviews the geopolitics as back drops of international news. It points out Eastern and Western cultures have inevitably clashed due to geopolitical and historical reasons, and news language has contradicted to reported countries’ value.
As for the methodology, the study will focus on the textual analysis and apply framing analysis and critical discourse analysis (Van Dijk, 1988a[3], 1988b[4], 1991[5]; Fairclough, 1992[6]; 1995[7]) to examining the narratives of China’s protests including the options in vocabulary, grammar, sentence structures, ad so forth in those coverages.
The study found in those major international news organisations, news has been framed through the choice of audio and textual information. For example, while leading Western media portray protests as “pro-democracy” activism and rebellions, (ABC, 14th September 2016)[8], (BBC, 13th September 2016)[9], the video recorded by a village journalist shows languages in protesters’ bands are “Long live the CPC, crack down corruption” or “Central government has justice” in Chinese. It shows that ABC and BBC tend to ignore the local political culture and try to fit the village protests into traditional Western protest context. Meanwhile, the narratives of Hong Kong police reported by BBC and CNN conform to a contra narrative of ‘police brutality’ in American media in which police is not the enforcement of the laws but suppress of human rights.
In conclusion, the international reports of China’s protests do not only represent the geopolitical conflicts between China and the West, but also reveal some insights of the global media industry. The international information flow is mainly a ‘one-way’ flow from the first world to the second and third world, and it contains the ideologies of the developed countries that are coped in the news language in which other parts of the worlds’ local culture and perspectives could be ignored or distorted.
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