Representations of China in the Global Media Disocurse

Abstract

News about China is ubiquitous, yet we know very little about how the global news media have represented China. This study is aimed at providing a theoretical overview of the global media representations of China. Arguably China remains one of the few countries which have been widely debated in both global media and public discourses vis-a-vis it’s growing economic and political influence in the global world order, its unique cultural and political system, and internal and external challenges. The modest attempt of the current study is to present an overreview of the dominant Western and non-Western media representations of China along with the theoretical and methodological approaches the studies utilized. The synthesis of the findings of the studies suggests that there is overwhelmingly negative and critical representation of China in the Western media often depicting China as “negative Other”. However, the non-Western media on the other hand depicted China in a favorable and nuanced ways. The findings are elaborated in the light of the forces and factors at play that might shape the media narratives on China in the cross political and cultural settings.