Chinese Media Discourse on the Trade War with the United States

• Název práce v češtině: Čínský mediální diskurz o obchodní válce se Spojenými státy
• Název v anglickém jazyce: Chinese Media Discourse on the Trade War with the United States
• Klíčová slova: Čínský mediální diskurz; analýza klíčových slov, analýza emotivity, Čínská média
• Klíčová slova anglicky: Chinese media discourse; keyword analysis; emotivity analysis; Chinese media
• Akademický rok vypsání: 2018/2019
• Typ práce: diplomová práce
• Jazyk práce: angličtina
• Ústav: Katedra mezinárodních vztahů (23-KMV)
• Vedoucí / školitel: doc. Michal Parízek, Ph.D.
• Řešitel: skrytý - zadáno vedoucím/školitelem
• Datum přihlášení: 28.06.2019
• Datum zadání: 03.10.2019
• Datum a čas obhajoby: 02.02.2021 00:00
• Datum odevzdání elektronické podoby: 29.12.2020
• Datum proběhlé obhajoby: 02.02.2021
• Oponenti: PhDr. Irah Kučerová, Ph.D.

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Předběžná náplň práce v anglickém jazyce

Topic Introduction:
This thesis aims to explore the Chinese media debate over the ongoing and dynamically developing trade war with the United States. This pressing issue has been at the center of the latest economic governance dispute, where like most agree, China and the United States strive for dominance. Current research to date has been concentrating on the macroeconomic and geopolitics implications of the conflict (Tan and Chen, 2019; Athukorala, 2017), while I am going to concentrate on the media narrative and its implications instead. I will look at the Chinese domestic narrative through various lenses in order to establish what is the official narrative on the topic and which arguments it uses to support Chinese legitimacy in the dispute. Due to the strong interdependence of the global economy, this ongoing conflict has serious implications not only for these two leading economies, but also for the rest of the world. Given the English-written media dominance in the world, it is therefore essential to explore the Chinese perspective on the situation, which is still not a very developed practice. Since the events being analyzed are quite recent and have been heavily covered by various media portals it gives me a unique opportunity to analyze development of narrative in real time. The main contribution of the analysis I am planning to perform lies in the fact that I use original untranslated articles from Chinese official media targeting the domestic audience. This is opposed to most western analysts, which generally tend to use Chinese media published in English targeted for overseas readership due to their language barrier. In the analysis I will concentrate on qualitative content analysis as well as a quantitative approach to support the qualitative claims through keyword targeting and interpret my findings with the help of Securitization theory.
Theoretical background in Literature:
Despite there not being many direct sources in journals about the trade war itself given its recency, there are some resources covering general phenomena which I can use to get a basic theoretical framework of the conflict such as Global Trade: War & Peace by Thomas Graham and Reciprocity in International Relations by Keohane. Other important sources will be the multilateral institutions literature, namely sources such as International Cooperation in Economic and Security Affairs by Lipson, The Role of Multilateral Institutions in International Trade Cooperation by Giovanni Maggi and International Economics and International Politics by Bergsten, Keohane and Nye, Democracy Enhancing Multilateralism by Keohane, Macedo and Moravcsik and New powers in the club: The challenges of global trade governance by Narlikar. I will also use literature dealing with the rise of China in a new global order deals with possible causes and outcomes of tension between the two superpowers in the region like After unipolarity: China's visions of international order in an era of U.S. decline by Schweller and Pu, Security in Northeast Asia: Structuring a Settlement by Shifrinson or The future of the liberal world order: internationalism after America by Ikenberry. Nevertheless, given my research topic an important stepping stone for the analysis of discourse will be the literature concentrating on security and securitization including The Three Faces of Securitization: Political Agency, Audience and Context by Balzacq, Securitization Theory: Legitimacy in Security Politics by Lenz-Rayman, The Evolution of International Security Studies by Buzan, Securitization, Social Identity, and Democratic Security: Nixon, India, and the Ties That Bind by Hayes, and Securitization and Desecuritization by Waever through which I will be able to understand how securitization process happens and why a certain narrative is being used more strategically than others. The Politics and Governance of Non-Traditional Security by Hameiri and Jones argues how nontraditional aspects of security should be conceptualized, while a fairly recent article The Role of External Security Actors in East Asia: How the EU and the United States shape regional security relations by Klose then explain what implications does the presence of external actors like USA have in Asia. Journals dealing with WTO and Chinese participation in it including Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation Is Failing When We Need It Most by Hale et al., Different Paths to Power: The Rise of Brazil, India, and China at the World Trade Organization by Hopewell and The WTO in Crisis: Lessons Learned from the Doha Negotiations on the Environment by Tarasofsky and Palmer will provide some background information about the WTO crisis. Introduction: China and the WTO into the Next Decade: Probing the Past and Present as a Path to Understand the Future by Blanchard and Understanding China's Behavioral Change in the WTO Dispute Settlement System by Li, Emerging Powers in an Age of Disorder by Schweller and Global politics are domestic politics: a societal approach to divergence in the G30 by Schirm explore Chinese embeddedness in the system more in depth and help explain the structural causes of conflict.
Research Question and Hypotheses:
The main question that I will attempt to answer in this paper is: “Through which narratives is the trade war with United States presented in Chinese media?”. My theoretical model expects four basic narratives out of which I will try to identify the most dominant one and find out if there is any change in the narratives over time as the dispute continues. The four main expected narratives, as presented in a simple scheme below, consist of combinations of two possible dimensions of conflict – politics and economy – in relation to two different perspectives – second and third image.
1. National Politics narrative – Having its basis in the Neorealist perspective (Mearsheimer, 2001), it presents the trade sanctions against China as an attack on the country as a representation of Chinese civilization and its citizens.
2. National Economy narrative – In accordance with Neoliberal political theory (Bergsten et al. 1975; Keohane et al. 2009) argues the intention of United states is to weaken the position of Chinese state heavily subsidized “National Champions”, which have been more successful than their less competitive American counterparts recently – China as a victim of economic warfare.
3. Global Economy narrative – Argues that as a result of China being successful in the system the United States had previously created, they are now trying to alter the rules of the economic governance as such to gain back their comparative advantage again following the Neoliberal political theory.
4. Global Politics narrative – Using the Neorealist lens, the new American customs are presented as an attempt to restrain China from gaining even more power and contesting American position of a global order keeper – China as a status quo power protects the multilateral system from US attacks. The main expectations are that the narrative used in Chinese domestic media will be focusing more on the spread of ideological values that present China as a strong entity in the domestic context, while the narrative of Chinese export media will likely articulate the Chinese position as a protector of the establishment, as opposed to the United States, which in this narrative becomes a revisionist power. Nevertheless, I still expect some overlap in the domestic and international narratives, especially in the later stage of the conflict, given the interconnectedness of domestic and foreign policy as mentioned by De Mesquita (2002), Levy (1988) or Chaudoin et al. (2015). Therefore, out of these four narratives I expect the starting point to be in the National Economy narrative and gradually shift towards the Global Politics narrative, in other words a shift from a Neoliberal to Neorealist point of view. A possible shift from China portraying itself as a victim of economic attacks to the defender of the multilateral trade system can be expected as a side effect. The reasoning behind this shift is likely the securitization process, which over time gives China more legitimacy in the eyes of its potential allies against the United States.
Research Methodology:
Method: The method of research used for this paper is computer assisted non-automated quality content analysis of Chinese main media articles concerning the Trade War in Chinese language. In order for a representative result of analysis I use between 300 and 500 articles published in various Chinese online media outlets in the time span from the very beginning of the problem until recent events. I will use a mixed method approach with a qualitative sample of articles analyzed in depth and quantitative keyword check on the whole body of articles used in order to validate the qualitative claims and ensure the representativeness of the whole sample as well. I will use the methods derived from Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology by Krippendorff and The Content Analysis Guidebook by Neuendorf. These books provide a solid methodological background that will be useful in establishing the methodology for my discourse research. Keywords: In the analysis I look for specific keywords representing the aforementioned narratives regarding the trade war problematics on various levels of discourse, their frequency of appearances and their appearance or disappearance in articles as the time progressed and the dispute escalated. I analyze the appearances of keywords article by article with the help of statistics tools in R or MS Excel and text corpus manager AntConc in combination with basic document search. In this part of my analysis, I will inspire myself by Affective News: The Automated Coding of Sentiment in Political Texts by Young and Soroka and Text as Data: The Promise and Pitfalls of Automatic Content Analysis Methods for Political Texts by Grimmer and Steward. Data: For the analysis I will choose only articles published by Chinese official media outlets, without using public alternatives. The reason for this choice is the existence of a publishing guideline for all Chinese media, which limits free debate as well as what is and is not to be published. Therefore, I have decided to exclude public and alternative Chinese media from this analysis, because the difference in content is likely to be insignificant enough for such aspect of analysis to be redundant. Apart from the language barrier for non-Chinese speakers, the media sources I have chosen are accessible online even outside of the territory of PRC, so the analysis does not require physical presence in the country.
List of expected Chinese official media used:
http://www.xinhuanet.cn
http://www.cctv.cn/
http://www.people.com.cn/index.html
http://gmw.cn/
http://cn.chinadaily.com.cn/
http://www.huanqiu.com
Planned Thesis Outline:
1. Topic Introduction
2. Theoretical Background in Literature
3. Research Question and Methodology
4. Empirical Findings
5. Conclusion
6. References