The U.S.-China trade war, which started in 2018 and escalated for almost two years, has been the major dispute between the United States and China. Some observers think this could be the start of a new Cold War between the United States and China.
Research about Chinese media found that commercialization and fast development of media technology brought about dramatic increases in the size and diversity in media news coverage since the 1990s. Nowadays China’s mainstream media has not only been commercialized, but is going to the new media as well with major news stories posted to WeChat accounts or news apps.
This study explores how Chinese mainstream media covers the US-China trade war by conducting a content analysis on traditional media as well as new media. The frames of US-China trade war stories from three major Chinese Party media, CCTV, the largest official TV platform in China and the WeChat accounts of the People’s Daily, the Global Times were analyzed and compared with a more market-driven news app, The Paper, to test if it covers the US-China trade conflicts in a different way from Party media. Because the media we chose for this study varies from the official traditional media, CCTV, to WeChat accounts of traditional mainstream new media and native digital news brands such as the Paper, we also measure how mainstream traditional media differ from the mainstream new media and how the mainstream new media compete in the market with native digital media like the Paper. We follow the widely used five common frames in international news put forward by Samekto and Valkenberg in their paper published in 2000. We also measure if there are competing frames in news stories because it is considered that an objective and fair reporting should contain competing frames.
Our results show that the four media outlets present the U.S.-China trade war more in the frames of economic consequences and conflicts. Despite the fact that the Chinese government condemned the U.S. administration for protectionism, bullying and improper practices, most Chinese media present the U.S.-China trade conflicts in economic rather than political frames.
While Chinese media share much in common in focusing on the frame of economic consequences and relying heavily on elite sources, significant differences exist between the four media outlets we chose. Two party newspapers, the People’s Daily and the Global Times attribute responsibilities to the US and focus very much on the conflict, but CCTV, the most official party media, and the Paper, the commercial oriented media outlet, did not attribute the responsibility to the U.S.. The market-oriented news app The Paper presents the U.S.-China trade conflict in the most neutral and non-partisan manner, while People’s Daily and Global Times are more partisan and more nationalistic.