Abstract
Since there is negative coverage of some western media on the business activities of Chinese overseas enterprises, which has adverse impact on the image of Chinese enterprises and even the national image of China, this study aims to detect the corporate social responsibility image (hereafter CSR image) of Chinese construction enterprises in Africa (hereafter CCEA) through analyzing the coverage of Financial Times (hereafter FT) from the UK and The Wall Street Journal (hereafter WSJ) from the US and dig up the motives behind their coverage. Octopus is first applied to mine and collect the reports data on CCEA from 2011 to 2019 by the two media. Two small corpora including the reports are then built. NVivo is next used to do the statistical analysis and clustering analysis of the keywords in two corpora as a whole and AntConc is finally utilized to do the statistics of high-frequency evaluative adjectives and nouns modified by evaluative adjectives as well as the concordance of the low-frequency words but closely relevant to corporate social responsibility (hereafter CSR) in two corpora, respectively. The results of the detailed analyses of the keywords are combined to unveil the CSR image of CCEA, which is followed by a discussion about the motives behind the coverage and finally some suggestions are put forward to improve the CSR image of CCEA. Theoretically, the present study promotes the interaction among data science, management, communications, and linguistics; practically it offers some advice to CCEA to elevate their CSR image.
Highlights
Since the Belt and Road Initiative was put forward in 2013, China has been broadening its cooperation network
Since we focus on the CSR image portrayed by the western media in this study, news data is collected from the ProQuest ABI/INFORM business information database which was released by ProQuest, an American company, 40 years ago
Conclusion is study finds that both FT and WSJ focus on the economic responsibilities of CCEA, with much less attention on the other social responsibilities. e overall CSR image of CCEA portrayed by the two media is that Chinese state-owned construction enterprises have conducted large-scale infrastructure construction and investments in Africa, which wins economic benefits for Chinese companies and promotes the economic development of Africa
Summary
Since the Belt and Road Initiative (hereafter BRI) was put forward in 2013, China has been broadening its cooperation network. As of the end of January 2020, China has signed up to 200 BRI cooperation documents with 138 countries and 30 international organizations [1]. By the end of January 2020, a total of 44 African countries have signed the BRI cooperation documents with China [1]. E construction advanced by BRI brings unprecedented opportunities as well as huge challenges to China-Africa cooperation. China’s investment in Africa is mainly concentrated in the construction, mining, manufacturing, finance, and technology services. The construction industry is rather sensitive to the issues like labor safety, production cost, and environmental protection. With more Chinese enterprises investing and trading in Africa, such negative remarks as “neocolonialism” and “resource predator” spread in all kinds of news reports, which prevail in the west and even in some African countries. A survey on “Africans’ Perceptions of Chinese Business in Africa” displays that 58% of 1,056 Africans from 15 African countries held a negative view that Chinese enterprises did not have a good reputation in their countries [3]
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