Why ‘strategic competitor’? : China’s national image formation in the United States facilitated by the Chinese media in Xi Jinping era

• Main Author: Liu, Kai
• Other Authors: Li Mingjiang
• Format: Theses and Dissertations
• Language: English
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: DRNTU::Social sciences::Political science::International relations
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/77192
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Since Xi Jinping took office in 2012, we have witnessed that the Chinese media has gradually adopted a more proactive tongue to hype China’s rise, which is accompanied by the aggravation of China’s national image in the United States. In 2018, China was officially labeled by Trump administration as a ‘strategic competitor’. Chinese media can be considered as one of the factors leading to the formation of this media as we can see there exist reports and editorials condemning the Chinese media under Xi’s leadership. This paper mainly examines how the Chinese media can facilitate the formation of China’s national image as ‘strategic competitor’ in the U.S. during Xi’s administration and discusses what strategies the Chinese media could adopt to craft a better national image of China. And to achieve these two goals, more questions are answered: What is ‘national image’? What is media’s role in its formation? How do the Chinese media report China in the Xi era? Why do they report it in that way? How can China craft a better national image in the U.S. through media? All of these questions will be answered in this paper, and to be more specific, this paper consists of four main parts. In the first section, an overall introduction of national image and media’s role in national image formation will be covered. In the second section, this paper will use two hottest campaigns in China after Xi took office to conduct two case studies, which are ‘China Dream’ and ‘One Belt, One Road Initiative’ to see how the Chinese media’s depictions influence the formation of China’s national image as a ‘strategic competitor’ in the United States. The third section mainly explores the reasons why Xi administration set Chinese media’s tongue in a proactive way when China or its rise is depicted. Last, in the fourth section, concrete strategies for China to use media to craft a better national image in the United States will be put forward based on the analysis above.