China’s mediated public diplomacy towards Japan: a text-as-data approach

ABSTRACT

As a rising power, China has realized that it is an urgent task to improve its national image among foreign publics. In the era of Xi Jinping, China has invested a substantial amount of resources in its foreign-language media to present a more favorable national image to an international audience. This study provides a novel approach to examine the content of China’s Japanese-language media and its dissemination. The study found that the Chinese state media promotes China’s soft power using two main strategies: (1) highlighting China’s culture and economic achievements, and (2) providing positive stories of China. A comparative content analysis of Chinese and Japanese media shows that Chinese media’s narratives are not well circulated in Japan’s public opinion field. This study has both substantive and methodological significance. Substantively, this investigation enhances our understanding of China’s strategic use of state-owned media for public diplomacy. Methodologically, this research contributes to the employment of quantitative text analysis methods on Japanese-language data.

KEYWORDS:

• Mediated public diplomacy
• content analysis
• state-owned media
• China
• Japan

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The articles from May 21 to August 3 in 2016 are not available on the internet. The reason is more likely to be some server errors rather than human removal. However, we can treat these articles as data missing at random because there are no especially important events happening during that period.

2 The frequency of ‘China’ is 135,282 and of ‘Japan’ is 70,705, which are far higher than the third rank feature ‘development’ whose frequency is 29,462.

3 Because STM is an unsupervised model, we cannot expect its results perfectly fit our theoretical predictions. In this case, although the model produces two topics (Topic 5 and Topic 7) on China’s economy and development, we should interpret the two topics together from a theoretical perspective.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yuan Zhou

Yuan Zhou is a PhD candidate at the Graduate School of Law, Kobe University. He specializes in international relations and political communication, focusing on China. He also works in quantitative research methods, especially quantitative text analysis.