To Love or to Loathe: How is the World Reacting to China's Rise?

TL;DR

This study analyzes international news coverage of China's rise, revealing increasing coverage, a shift towards economic focus, and generally declining sentiment across multiple countries.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of global media reactions to China's economic growth using news frequency, topic classification, and sentiment analysis.

Findings

News coverage of China has increased in all studied countries.

Most countries show a shift towards economic reporting on China.

Sentiment towards China is generally becoming more negative, except in Australia and France.

Abstract

China has experienced a spectacular economic growth in recent decades. Its economy grew more than 48 times from 1980 to 2013. How are the other countries reacting to China's rise? Do they see it as an economic opportunity or a security threat? In this paper, we answer this question by analyzing online news reports about China published in Australia, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, South Korea, the UK and the US. More specifically, we first analyze the frequency with which China has appeared in news headlines, which is a measure of China's influence in the world. Second, we build a Naive Bayes classifier to study the evolving nature of the news reports, i.e., whether they are economic or political. We then evaluate the friendliness of the news coverage based on sentiment analysis. Empirical results indicate that there has been increasing news coverage of China in all the countries under study. We also find that the emphasis of the reports is generally shifting towards China's economy. Here Japan and South Korea are exceptions: they are reporting more on Chinese politics. In terms of global sentiment, the picture is quite gloomy. With the exception of Australia and, to some extent, France, all the other countries under examination are becoming less positive towards China.